Romans 3

Read Romans 3.

            Let’s take a look at chapter 3 in the three sections the NIV suggests. First, there are verses 1-8, which continue the theme about Israel and God’s relationship to her. New Testament scholar, NT Wright, from whom I’ve learned a ton, puts it this way:

Paul saw that the Jewish problem of God’s righteousness (if the creator of the world is Israel’s covenant God, why is Israel still oppressed?) had been answered in a new and striking way in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The answer had, in fact, forced a restatement of the question, demonstrating as it did the universal sinfulness of Jews as well as pagans. The gospel, Paul declares, proves that God is in the right despite appearances: he has kept covenant with Abraham, has dealt properly with sin, has acted and will act without partiality, and upholds all those who cast themselves, helpless, on his mercy (Rom. 1:16-17; 2:1-16; 3:21 – 4:25). God has, in other words, shown ‘righteousness’ in the sense appropriate for the judge and the Lord of the covenant.

(You can read the whole article here.) I think the phrase “the Jewish problem of God’s righteousness” is a good explanation of the purpose of the letter: to show that God has kept His promises to Israel, even though when Paul writes the letter a) Israel is still under foreign domination and b) the church is starting to be increasingly comprised of Gentiles.

            In the second section (verses 9-20), Paul returns to his theme, that all alike are under the power of sin. Unspoken, but important—being Jew in itself is not the thing that saves. And having Moses’ law, while a privilege (v. 2), is not the thing that saves because Moses’ law highlights human failures to please God (v. 20), a theme he’ll return to in chapter 7.

            Finally, in verses 21-31, Paul turns his attention to the Good News, namely, that  righteousness, attested throughout the Old Testament and apart from the law of Moses, has been made known. Now here’s a trick of translation: if we translated verse 21 more literally it would read, “But now, apart from law, righteousness of God has been made known.” The thrust here seems to be that God has demonstrated His own rightness—to His covenant with Israel and to humanity—in a different way, namely, through the atoning death of Jesus. The importance of this subtle difference is that Paul is more interested in what we call objective justification than subjective justification. That is, he is more interested to show how God in Jesus saved all humanity than he is to talk about how we receive that gift. Not to say, Paul is uninterested in the latter, just that his emphasis is on the former.

            That reminds me of an encounter I had many years ago with a college group. I think it was an InterVarsity group, and one of my members had invited me to come and talk to them. Their theme that year was styled after the old “Got Milk?” campaign and was “Got Faith?” My presentation basically said, “You’ve got the wrong theme. If you start with faith, you are starting with humans, and you’re making faith into just another work. If you start with Jesus and who He is and what He did, you are starting with the Gospel and faith follows the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Paul is making the same point in Romans 3, a fact that is unfortunately obscured when we move from Greek to English.