Before moving on from Paul’s first big argument, it’s time for another targum, a loose explanatory paraphrase of the text:
[3.21] But now, God’s justice has been revealed apart from the Law (though the Law and Prophets foretell it), that is, God’s justice for all who faithfully participate in Jesus’ good-faith life. God doesn’t divide us into insiders and outsiders. We’ve all sinned and fall short of God’s glory and yet we’re made right with God by God’s gracious gift, through Jesus’ freeing acts. You know how the old Jerusalem Temple had a place the high priest would cleanse so he could encounter God’s presence there? Jesus is that place for us now, cleansed with blood. God did all this in order to show what God’s justice looks like: forgiving the sins of the old life, and making people right with God in Jesus’ faithfulness.
[3.27] There’s no room in all this for boasting. For it doesn’t work by the law of ‘earning your keep.’ It works only through the law of good faith. And by what law does this all work? The law earning your keep? No: only the law of good faith. Our belief is this: A person is made right with God by good faith, without reference to the Law of Moses. I mean, is God the God of Jews only? Of course not. God is the God of everyone, Gentiles included. God is one and makes everyone right with God on the same grounds. If you’re circumcised, you’re made right through your faithfulness. And if you’re not, you’re made right through your faithfulness. Does that mean we restrict the Law on account of faithfulness? Not at all. No, we uphold God’s laws.
[4.1] But if all this is true, what do we say about Abraham, our Jewish ancestor? If indeed he was made right with God by his law-following, he’d have something to boast about, though not before God. But what does the Scripture say? “Abraham had faith in God, and this was accounted to him as justice.” As anyone who has a job knows, wages are not a gift but what has been earned. But that’s not what happened here: Abraham didn’t earn his way into God’s good graces, but trusted the God who makes things right for the ungodly. This is the kind of faith that sets things right. As David sang, pronouncing a blessing on those who are made right with God without ‘earning it’:
Blessed are those whose injustices are forgiven,
and whose sins God chooses not to see.
Blessed are those whose sins YHWH doesn’t count
Does this blessing apply only to those who are circumcised? Or does it apply to foreskin too? If we believe that Abraham’s faith was accounted to him as justice, was this accounting done before or after he was circumcised? It was before. He received the symbol of circumcision as a seal of that relationship he had with God by being faithful while his foreskin was still intact. And so, Abraham isn’t just the ancestor of those who have been circumcised, faithfully following the example of this symbol of his faithfulness, but spiritually also the ancestor of those who haven’t been circumcised, but who faithfully follow the example of his faithfulness itself. For Abraham’s promise that he would be the father of many nations and therefore inherit the world was not made to him because he obeyed the law of circumcision but because of his faithfulness that God called justice. That promise would then be meaningless if it only applied to those who have the Law of Moses. Really, wrath follows in the law’s wake, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
So the promise depends on faith, so that it might rest on grace, so that it might apply to all of those ‘many nations’ who are Abraham’s spiritual descendants and follow in his faithful footsteps. God made this promise when Abraham was quite old, but Abraham trusted, hoping against hope, that it would come to pass. Even when he was old and his body was ‘as good as dead’, or after Sarah was long past childbearing age, he did not waver concerning God’s promise, but grew even stronger in his faith as he gave glory to God, firmly trusting that God could do what God promised. This is the kind of faith that is accounted as justice! And it’s the same for us, who have faith in the one who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead, who was handed over because of our sins and raised to make us right with God.
[5.1] So then, since we have been made right with God by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has opened the doors to this grace for us and because of whom we boast in the hope of experiencing the full glory of God. But we also boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering makes us resilient, and resilience is a proof of character, and proof of character makes us hopeful. Such hope never puts us to shame, because the Holy Spirit who gives us life has poured out God’s love in our hearts.
For while we were still weak in the old ways, in due season, Christ died on behalf of the ungodly. It’s rare enough for someone to die on behalf of the just, but Jesus died on our behalf as a demonstration of God’s love while we were still sinners. So how much more will we be saved from God’s righteous anger? For if the death of God’s son reconciled us to God while we were enemies, how much more will we be protected in his resurrected life now that we’ve been reconciled! Now that’s something to boast about!
Matthew Root 