Read or listen the Epistle to the Romans chapter 3 online (ESV, Bible Gateway)

In the first chapter of Romans, Paul showed that Gentiles living without the law are sinners before God. They have become more and more entangled in their own sinfulness and have become even slaves to sin.

In the second chapter, Paul gave an equally dark description of the Jews. Although they have the law, they have not kept it.

So Paul made all mankind guilty before God (compare verse 9). Paul crushed to the ground all human attempts to get even with God. It is an absolute, irrevocable fact that all people, regardless of their origin, are indebted to God in God's eyes. And worst of all, none of them can pay their debt.

In the third chapter, Paul begins to "construct": after he earlier destroyed people's false imaginations about their relationship with God and the way of salvation, now Paul begins to tell how people are saved, that is, how the debt is forgiven.

This subject is the most vital to our faith. The question of the basis of our salvation is more important than anything else in the Christian faith – we build everything else on it. If we are wrong about this, we are also wrong about everything else.

Was God's work for Israel in vain? Rom. 3:1-8

In the verses 1-8 of the third chapter, Paul continues to discuss the Jewish question. Was the covenant between God and Israel completely pointless if the Jews are not in a better position than the Gentiles?

Although this is the case in the matter of salvation itself, man still has not been able to completely nullify God's works of mercy. Even if Israel's history is a dark history of apostasy, at the same time it still is God's salvation history. Israel's apostasy culminated in the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. God's salvation history culminated in the same situation.

Man does not see things through God's eyes. Even though Israel was unfaithful, God has remained faithful and moved the salvation history onward despite Israel's resistance, and sometimes even with their help.

Questions and answers

Paul again asks himself questions. He engages in this "conversation with himself" throughout the Epistle to the Romans. In the Romans, there are a total of 70 sentences that are followed by a question mark. Apparently, in the background, there usually have been real objections which Paul is reiterating and to which he then answers. Paul had been attacked in many ways from various quarters, and he knew that eventually the same objections would be presented in Rome too.

Doesn't a law-free gospel, salvation by grace, lead to the belittling of sin and a life of sin, the opponents asked. It has often really happened: there have arisen various Freedmen movements, i.e. free-from-the-law movements. It was easy for Paul's opponents to get support for their argument from real life.

But those had gone astray, they had not properly understood God's way of salvation. The thinking of those who trivialize the law is the thinking of someone who does not truly know God and his will (verse 5). God's ways are not our ways, nor are our thoughts God's thoughts (Is 55:8-9). We cannot understand God's way of salvation by using human thinking. It requires the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Paul gets back to this question at the beginning of the sixth chapter.

There are ditches on both sides of the road

Paul – like Luther later – had to fight a two-front battle. The foundation of salvation was and is taught in two wrong ways.

On one side, there are those who demand works of the law as a condition of faith. Paul had to fight against these so-called Judaizers, especially in Galatia.

On the other side, there are the so-called Freedmen, who understood Paul's teaching to mean that nothing limits a Christian after salvation. Their problem was that they did not understand what God saves a person for.

Even today, the right doctrine must be demarcated in two directions. The world and man have not changed since the days of Paul in this matter. It is still easy to misinterpret matters of faith in one way or another.

No one is righteous – Rom. 3:9-20

Paul ends his presentation of man's problem with a "sermon" that comprises quotations from Psalms and Isaiah (59:7-9). The quotes are not verbatim, and there are several reasons for it. Of course, Paul could not carry with him the entire Old Testament (compare 2 Tim. 4:13), and it is unlikely that he owned one, because books (=scrolls) were very expensive at that time. So he had to quote the Old Testament from memory. In addition, he also had to translate it, because he certainly knew the Old Testament better in Hebrew, although he certainly also knew very well the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

The outcome is gloomy: even the Old Testament teaches that no one is good, no one has fully obeyed God's will, no one is innocent before the law.

Do we seek to deny our own sinfulness and guilt? We often tend to downplay our own trespasses and transgressions while exaggerating the mistakes and shortcomings of our neighbours before God. This is how we become better than others. But the falsehood of such thinking is revealed when God's Word can illuminate our lives. In its bright light, we and others appear equally sinful. No one is innocent or spotless before the mirror of the law.

The doctrine of original sin – the doctrine of the fundamental depravity of man – is very difficult for the people of this time to accept. Even in the Schmalkald Articles, which are part of the Lutheran Book of Concord, it is stated that the doctrine of original sin is too deep a truth for us to understand. We just have to believe it as the truth of God.

Even though there is endless evidence all around us that man is completely evil and sinful, we would still like to think that we are good. After all, no one wants to be terminally ill, not even in the matter of salvation! Everything should develop and improve. Popularity has never been gained by proclaiming to people that they are wicked and incapable of good.

But if the doctrine of original sin is abandoned, we will have to reinterpret the entire Christian faith. Everything old collapses and becomes foolish. The atoning work of Jesus on the cross of Calvary becomes pointless and we will have to save ourselves. But in various parts of the world there are "Christian" preachers who proclaim the goodness of man.

Divine inconsistency

According to human reason, the task of the law is to make a person good and blameless, or at least reduce a person's evil. But Paul sees it quite the opposite: the law makes man guilty and unworthy before God. The more zealously a person tries to follow the law, the more impossible he finds his task. In the end, he is faced with only two options: either to give up and admit that he will never be able to fulfill the law, or falsely try to reinterpret the law so that it would be possible to fulfill it.

The task of the law is to show us that we cannot be saved by our own strength. No one can stand before God. Every mouth will be shut. The law brings us a sense of sin and the inevitability of God's judgment, not salvation.

Salvation by grace through Christ's atoning work – Rom. 3:21-26

Only now does Paul get to what he has been aiming at all along: how a person is saved. Everything above has aimed at this. This section contains the most important idea of the entire Epistle to the Romans: salvation is by grace alone, because of Christ's work alone, by faith alone, as the reformer Martin Luther summed it up.

The law has brought man to a dead end. But God gives a solution to the man who got to this dead end: as man was unable to fulfill the law and thereby attain salvation, now salvation comes without the law. Since man could not reconcile himself to God, Christ did it for us. Until the end, our faith remains as faith in the forgiveness of sins.

Jesus died for all the sins and for the atonement of all people of all time. The French physicist Blaise Pascal said the same in the form of a mathematical formula, "That the infinite God suffered for a finite moment is equivalent to a finite man suffering infinitely, eternally!" Until Jesus came, God had postponed the punishment of sins, but at Calvary sin was judged and atoned for.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21)

Evil and sin are always incompatible with a holy God. God never condones sin, but his justice demands that it is condemned. However, that judgment did not fall on the sinner, but on the only Sinless One at Calvary. This is grace.

However, those who do not want to have Jesus' work as the basis of their own salvation, as their sin offering, must face the holy God with their own strength. Luther said that the holy God can only be encountered through Jesus, under his protection.

The cross of Calvary, and nothing else, is the basis of Salvation. Salvation comes to us from outside ourselves. We ourselves are not able to attain it; it is given to us as a gift (verse 24).

The "righteousness of God" in verse 21 can be understood in two ways: either as the righteousness that God requires of us or as the righteousness that God gives us. Noticing this difference, Martti Luther found the merciful God.

In Greek, verse 25 has the word "hilasterion", which usually means the lid of the Ark of the Covenant. Luther translated the word here "mercy seat". In some translations, it is more loosely interpreted as "atoning sacrifice". In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Jukka Thurén suggests the following translation: "...God has made Christ's bloodstained cross a place of atonement for sins, where they can come with faith."

One God – one way of salvation – Rom. 3:27-31

The Jews boasted of their status as the chosen people. God and the Law were what separated them from the Gentiles. It was to them that God had spoken; they had received the Law and revelation. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) was the "creed" of the Jews. The Jews placed special emphasis on the word "our" God. If someone wanted to be saved, first he had to become a Jew, a member of the chosen people. The Lord was the God of Israel.

But Paul – once again – sees things in a different light than his countrymen. He emphasizes the word "one". If there is only one God, there can be only one way of salvation. God saves both Jews and Gentiles in the same way: through faith. (The separation in verse 30 is mainly a stylistic device).

In verse 31, Paul reminds us again that the law-free gospel does not mean that the law is nullified or trivialized.