Sermon Tone Analysis

Part Three of Justification by Faith, or Abraham and Grace

                                                     (Romans 3:29-4:25)

Introduction:

            The title of our lesson this morning is . . . .

and in this message we will finish up chapter three and then begin chapter four.

And really, our last verses in chapter three are about two groups of people, two families if you will, Jew and Gentile, and it is also about the truth of both groups having the same God.

Paul makes it very clear that even though the Gentiles had wandered off and worshiped gods of their own creation, they still had the true and living God to deal with, didn’t they?

He writes that God, /the/ God, the only God, is the same for both the Jews and the Gentiles.

Let me review the meaning of the term justification.

What does it mean when we say that we are justified before God.

To begin with, what is the central dilemma of humanity?

God is holy and we are not, right?

God is just and righteous and we are a singularly unjust and unrighteous race, aren’t we?

And here is the rub: you and I are going to stand before this holy and righteous God and give an account of our lives.

And as we have discussed before, God is not merely this vast forgiving machine out there, pumping out neat, sanitized little forgiveness packages, is He?

For God to forgive us was a very costly matter.

For God to forgive us was a very bloody and savage affair.

Forgiveness of sin, the great wonder of salvation, cost God the sacrifice of His Son!

So valuable was that sacrifice that God pronounced it valuable by raising Jesus from dead, so that Christ died for us and was raised for our justification.

Through that marvelous, bloody, and miraculous event, God does what?

He declares us not guilty; He declares us innocent; and He declares us righteous!

He /gives/ us the very righteousness that only God’s own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, ever in fact possessed.

And by that gift of Christ’s own righteousness you and I are able to stand before a holy and righteous God.

How is this righteousness, this justifacation, this salvation, appropriated by us?

Faith!

What we want to look at this morning is that this God, the One who chose the physical descendents of Abraham through whom to work the miracle of redemption, is the God of everyone, isn’t He?

He is the God of the Jew and He is the God of the Gentile.

And He has always been the God of everyone.

He has just chosen a particular people, and their history, to most fully reveal Himself.

And in order for faith in Christ to be the vehicle by which God applies the work of Jesus to repentant sinners, in order for the Messiah to take upon the humanity of God’s fallen creatures, He had to choose a people, didn’t He?

And He chose Abraham!

Why He did is something we will explore in the coming weeks as we continue our studies in this most wonderful of Paul’s letters.

I. Two Families, One God (Rom.

3:29-31)

     1.

A Universal Remedy (v.

29-30)

            (1 Sometimes we get kind of confused about how God could choose the Jews to be His covenant people and not ours.

Why did God choose them and not the people group that we came from?

I forget what the context of the discussion was, but a guy I once knew asked me this very question.

In discussing the truth of God’s choosing of the Jewish people, this guy asked plaintively, “Well, where were my people?”

The real question behind this question, I think, was why did He choose them and not mine?

Were my people not good enough?

And there is an easy answer to this: no, his people weren’t good enough.

And neither were the Jewish people either.

And listen, while the Jews were never a great missionary people, God has never allowed His Word to remain stagnant and stuck in just one place.

Even when He punished His people for their sin and dispersed them among the nations as punishment, part of His plan was undoubtedly to spread the word about Himself.

To let the Gentile world know that He was alive and that He had given one people the truth about Himself.

Look at your Bible, verses 29-30.

(2 Paul wrote in Galatians 4:4-5: Galatians 4:4-5 (KJV) \\

4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, 5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

We are all, Jew and Gentile, under the command of a holy God to come to Christ, aren’t we? Jesus was born of a woman, born under the Law.

What Law?

The Law of the Moses, right?

In the book of Acts, Paul, in his sermon to philosophers in Athens, said that God had commanded all men everywhere to repent.

Acts 17:30 (KJV) \\

30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Paul’s sermon on Mar’s Hill, as it is called, was directed toward the intellectual elite of Athens.

They held council on one of the hills around the city of Athens, cussing and discussing and passing judgement on the philosophies and religions of the day.

Paul was called before this council to give an account of this new religion of his.

But was it a new religion?

Or was the Gospel Paul preached a continuation of the Old Covenant?

It was both old and new, wasn’t it?

But the Gospel sprang from the promises God made to the Jewish people, right?

And most specifically, Father Abraham from whom the Jews and all people of faith came from.

We will begin to see that later in this lesson.

But what Paul was saying in his sermon in Athens, and what he is saying in Rom.

3:29-30 is that the God of the Jews is the God of the entire world.

There is no other!

Jesus said as much too, didn’t He?

            (3 You remember the story of the Samaritan woman at the well from the Gospel of John?

Let’s turn to the passage and look at it quickly.

John 4:19-24.

Right after Jesus has informed this woman that He knows much about her personal life–that she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband–Jesus ends this encounter with the Samaritan woman by revealing to her the nature of true worship.

Look at your Bibles, John 4:19-24.

(4 The Samaritans were closely related to the Jewish people.

Back in B. C. 677 the king of Assyria transported a group of people from Babylon to replace the Jews he had exiled to Assyria.

The Samaritans, as they came to be called, were originally idol worshipers, but over time adopted the religion of the remaining Jews in the Northern Kingdom.

They also intermarried with the remaining Jews in the Land.

However, they didn’t abandon all their pagan ways, they added on worship of the one true God to the religions they brought with them from Babylon.

But notice verse 22. Look at it again.

What is Jesus saying here?

(5 The Samaritans rejected all the OT revelation with the exception of the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, or the Torah as the Jews call it.

Therefore their worship was in ignorance of the entire revelation of God, right?

If they had accepted all the OT they would have known that the promised Messiah was to come from the Jews.

It was to the Jews that God had given all the Biblical revelation.

The salvation that was to be found for everyone was to be found in One who was born of Jewish woman, born under the Law!

But, and that is a large word sometimes, this Messiah would not remain Jewish property, would He?

He belonged to the whole world!

Jesus finishes by telling this woman that God is Spirit and that the worship of Him must be in spirit and truth.

He is not some territorial god as many of the ancients believed.

He was not just the God of the Jews.

As Paul wrote back in Romans, He was, and is, the God of us all.

Go back to Romans with me and look at 3:29-30.

(6 There is only one God and He has chosen to reveal Himself through creation, the history and faith of the Jewish people, through the written revelation He gave to His people, and most miraculously, through the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, God in the flesh.

2.

Establishment of the Law Through Faith (v.

31)

            (1 Paul finishes chapter three by asking a question.

It is one that he has answered before and one he will answer again before he is done writing the book of Romans.

The question is, does grace abolish law, or render it ineffective and purposeless?

Does it set the law aside so that it has no relevance to the Christian?

Does faith “nullify the law”?

Look at verse 31 for the answer.

(2 The phrase make void means to overthrow, to nullify, to destroy, to abolish, to do away with.

Paul said, God forbid, right?