Living by Faith - Romans

We Establish the Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Living by Faith

Lesson: 11-64

Genre: Talk

Track: 011

Dictation Name: RR311F11

Location/Venue:

Year: ?

Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth; seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon Him and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.

Let us pray. All glory, praise and honor be unto Thee oh Lord our God, we give thanks unto Thee; we praise Thee. We magnify Thee, for Thou hast made all things in Thy wisdom and majesty, and Thou hast made us to glorify Thee and to enjoy Thee forever. Fill our hearts with thanksgiving, make us every the objects of your grace, that we might walk in the joy of life, that we might serve Thee with all our heart, mind and being, and that we might see Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Jesus name, amen.

Our scripture this morning is from Romans 3:21-31; our subject: We Establish the Law. Romans 3:21-31

“21 But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;

22 Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:

23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:

25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.

28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

29 Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also:

30 Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.

31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.”

Saint Paul in writing to the Romans had many practical problems in mind, all facing the churches in Rome and elsewhere. He writes with a full awareness of these problems. First of all on the one hand there were the Judaizers, a very strong party at that time, in fact perhaps the most powerful single group. These were the Jewish believers, a very large number. We do not appreciate the situation in the first century unless we realize that the church was overwhelmingly Jewish in its background; that a very large number of people in Judea and Galilee, were, if not actual members of the church, very sympathetic and intensely interested.

The problem however with the Judaizers was that they felt that converts should become Jews first, and then received into the church; that there could be no direct conversion from paganism to Christianity, they had to go through the process first of becoming Jews. Then there was a party that called itself ‘The Strong’ and Paul deals with this in the latter part of the book or the epistle to the Romans.

The slogan of The Strong which we find in 1 Corinthians 6:12 was: “All things are lawful for me.” These were antinomians. Now, we should note by the way, that in writing to the Corinthians, Paul sarcastically tells them they are strong, but he says: “I am weak.” Because Paul was not an antinomian, and to believe in the law was regarded as a weakness. One scholar, John C. Brunt has seen this group, The Strong as the precursors of the later Gnostic cults, and he writes and I quote: “Thus we conclude that at Corinth there was a group of Gnostic type individuals who made claims to knowledge and freedom, and were enthusiastically oriented. Their freedom included a certain license with regard to sexual immorality, and the right to eat food offered to idols. These individuals wrote to Paul and asked him about the practice of eating idol meat, probably for reasons that are not evident from the text, defending their practice.”

Now, the Judaizers tended to use the law for salvation, whereas The Strong abandoned it altogether. Possibly we could speak of a third party, the Hellenizers. Basically they were the second party, The Strong, only more philosophically oriented. We shall deal with that aspect later.

But this tells us that Paul was meeting head on in this letter and other letters, with a major problem, the problem of on the one hand, people who wanted to pull back Christianity into a defective form of Judaism, and those who wanted to pull Christianity over into a paganism, a form of Hellenism. This is why Paul’s writings are often regarded as difficult or knotty, full of hard knots. Paul writes like a lawyer, like a judge; you can encounter this type of extreme care given to language in old-fashioned legal documents. You can encounter it also in the Talmud. Paul after all was trained in that type of rabbinic tradition.

So he writes with that extreme care and precision, knowing that there are two groups, each trying to divert Christianity and pull it into a wayward faith. So he begins in this section, that what he is saying and says in verse 21, has been witnessed by the law and the prophets; and what is it? The righteousness of God without the law, the justice of God manifested in the salvation of man without man having to become perfect in the law; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe; for there is no difference.

What Paul is saying is that in Christ’s atonement which he deals with in verses 24 through 26, the righteousness of God without the law, or apart from the law, is manifested; it is witnessed by the law and the prophets that there is one plan of salvation from the beginning of the Bible to the end, that man is saved not by works of man’s law, or by works of Gods law, but by the grace of God. And so he says there is one doctrine in all the Bible, the Old Testament sets it forth, Christ manifests it very clearly. Paul speaks of this continuity many times in Romans, as for example in Romans 1:2, Romans 9:25-33, Romans 10:16-21, Romans 11:1-10, 26-29, Romans 15:8-12 and Romans 16:26.

In fact, in Romans 15:9 Paul insists Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers. So that, Jesus Christ is set firmly in the context of the Old Testament, inseparably.

Now, an important fact for us to remember is this, a fact that doesn’t occur to anyone of us, but it was not until about the third century or the fourth that the Bible was divided into Old and New Testaments. It was one Bible, all of it brought together. What happened? Well, Marcion, a pagan thinker who went to the Bible to justify certain strands and to tie the Bible as a Hellenizer into certain essentially pagan beliefs, said that there were two Gods in the Bible, the God of justice, wrath, law, on the one hand; and the God of love, mercy on the other. And the whole of the Old Testament he said belonged to the bad God.

Then he found too much of the bad God in the New, so he wound up with only a limited number of passages. Now some of the Marcionites did not divide the faith into two Gods, they said there were two dispensations, and some of course held to more. And so they said, “Well, there are elements of the old dispensation still in the evangelists and apostles, so that we have to find where the new dispensation is in the New Testament.”

Now, if that sounds very much like modern dispensationalism and Scofieldianism, it is because this is where that kind of thinking comes from.

Well, in the course of defending the New Testament, they singled out these books and created as it were a separate section of the Bible. But properly this is one book, and the division “Old and New Testaments” is something that came in as a result of the Marcionite heresy. But we can best understand the Bible if we see it as one continuous book from Genesis through Revelation. I shall be dealing with that fact of Marcion in a subsequent position paper.

Paul in Romans 4, turns to Abraham and David to show the unity of the Bible, because this is his concern in Romans. The just are redeemed by faith, and they live by faith, he says, in all ages; from the beginning of the world to the end, there is no other way. It is the same plan of salvation.

In verse 21 therefore, Paul sets forth this fact clearly, to correct the false premises in Rome. Cranfield, one scholar, has said of verse 21 that it is one of the great hinge sentences of Romans. Paul saw the law and the prophets as witness to Gods plan of salvation, as apart from the works of law. As Sanford C. Mills has written and I quote: “The law shows man what righteousness or justice is. It also shows him that sin is the separating factor between man and God; the entire preceding portion of this epistle has been correcting man’s conception of himself.”

Gods righteousness or justice is manifested, it is revealed in and through Jesus Christ, and it is the same for all. As verse 22 says, there is no difference. Paul thus bars the division between the testaments, it is the same God, it is the same covenant, it is the same plan of salvation. And that plan of salvation is manifested in all its perfection and glory in Jesus Christ, set forth previously typically in the blood of bulls and goats, the sacrificial system; and now we have propitiation through Christ’s atoning blood.

As (San de an hedlum?) wrote and I quote: “In what sense can the death of Christ be shown to demonstrate the righteousness of God? it demonstrates it by showing the impossibility of simply passing over sin.”

The penalty for sin is death. All men in Adam broke the covenant, all men are sinners, but God is faithful. A covenant is a treaty of law between two parties. The Biblical Covenant, because it is between a greater and a lesser, between the infinite and almighty God and man His creature, is a covenant of grace as well as of law, because any time a greater person, even on the human sphere, entered into a covenant with a lesser person, it was a covenant of law but of grace, and it is supremely and totally of grace with God, and at the same time of love. In a covenant, both parties bind themselves to be faithful to the other unto death; but man broke the covenant. God provides the man, Jesus Christ, who is also God the Son to discharge the death penalty of the covenant, and to keep it unto faithfulness, in order to reinstate those who are members of Him into an honorable, a just position in the covenant.

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God, therefore Paul says: “There is one plan for all, because all alike are sinners, and there is no other access to God except by the atonement.” And verse 24 tells us that this is a free act of grace by God through Jesus Christ; as verse 22 says: “unto all and upon all them that believe:”

Men have sinned, Paul says in verse 23, and come short of the glory of God. Rabbis and theologians in older times would speak much of the glory of God. Rabbis held that the reflection of the divine glory brightens Adams face in paradise. Both Cranmer and the Geneva Bible render this verse: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” this way: “For all have sinned and are destitute of the glory of God.” and Whitcliffe rendered it: “For all men sin, and have need of the glory of God.” All three verses bring out something of the meaning Paul had in mind.

Christ’s salvation began our restoration into Gods glory, because it made us partakers of Christ. As Calvin said, commenting on this and I quote: “When therefore we are justified, the efficient cause is the mercy of God; the meritorious is Christ, the instrumental is the word in connection with faith. Hence faith is said to justify, because it is the instrument by which we receive Christ, in whom righteousness is conveyed to us. Having been made partakers of Christ, we ourselves are not only just, but our works are also counted just before God; and for this reason, because whatever imperfections there may be in them are obliterated by the blood of Christ, the promises which are conditional are also by the same grace fulfilled to us, for God rewards our works as perfect, in as much as their defects are covered by free pardon.”

Now, the word ‘propitiation’ in verse 25  “Whom God hath set forth” (Jesus Christ) “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood,” Is a very interesting word. In this instance it literally means in the Greek: “whom God hath ordained to be a mercy seat through faith in His blood.” Now the mercy seat was in the holy of holies; on the day of atonement it was sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifice. Jesus Christ is said by Paul to be the Mercy Seat, opened to all.

This tells us, first, it is only faith in Christ, not faith as such which makes a man a Christian as Hodge stated it. It is not enough to believe every word of the Bible; it means faith in the person of Christ as our mercy seat. He is thus more than teacher or prophet.

Second, Paul says faith in Christ is faith in His atonement, “faith” as Hodge says, “in a sacrifice is by the very force of the terms, reliance on a sacrifice.” Faith is not merely believing, it is a reliance on the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice, and third faith stresses the justice, the righteousness of God. It means that we believe that God takes the law so seriously that it requires the death of God the Son; because the law is so serious to God, therefore it must be serious to us.

This is why Paul says in verse 31: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid.” Which is a Greek form of a Hebrew statement: ‘God forbid such blasphemy.’ “Yea, we establish the law.

Paul draws the conclusions from what he has said in verses 27-31. He tells us that self-glorying is excluded. Any boasting in our human status is excluded. “By what law?” he asks; by the law of faith. Our Lord Himself said: “This is the work of God; that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.” Faith rests in God’s work in Christ.

Hence Paul says: “therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith, without the deeds of the law.” So writes Paul in verse 28. Hodge says and I quote: “To be justified without works is to be justified without anything in ourselves to merit justification.”

Paul does not say that the covenant man does not need to obey the law, but that he is justified without works of the law; a radically different meaning. Works, the law, is separated from justification, not from our covenant life, from our sanctification, from our daily growth, from our daily faithfulness to God. Hence Paul said: “Boasting is excluded.” There is one God, hence there is one plan of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike, or in Paul’s words: “For the circumcision and the uncircumcision.” As a result, as Hodge says and I quote: “We the Gentiles may now look up to heaven and confidently say: “Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and though Israel acknowledge us not.”

Paul insists again and again in his epistles, as in Galatians 3:6-9, that we are the seed of Abraham, by faith. He attacks the separation of the church from the Old Testament and from Abraham, and also from the law.

Thus, to turn Paul into an antinomian is absurd. It is sad to see a great and able commentator like doctor Gifford of the last century, in commenting on Romans 3:31, “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid, yea, we establish the law.” Gifford strains over this verse, and says: “Paul is not talking about the Old Testament law, he is talking about the natural law, that he is establishing.” Or some other kind of law, any law except the Old Testament.

Now does this make sense; that God would say: ‘I am voiding the law I gave, but I am establishing Greek law, or Roman law, or Buddhist law, or Islamic law, or natural law, any law that any person has, I have established, and voided mine.’ It is insanity to think so, and yet because of the triumph of the Hellenizers, so much of the church has thought so.

Paul denies that the law justifies; it sanctifies. Even of the so-called ceremonial laws Calvin says and I quote: “They are in reality confirmed by Him, Christ.” and he continues: “I therefore take this defense of Paul not only as to ceremonies, nor as to the commandments which are called moral, but with regard to the whole law universally. The law of God expresses the righteousness or justice of God, it is therefore an immutable law. Paul’s concern thus in Romans is one which should be our concern. The church broke with the Judaizers; the Judaizers became two off-shoots, a couple of sects which after a few centuries died out.

Unhappily, the church then followed the Hellenizers, and we shall see subsequently how much they did so.

What we have seen over the centuries is again and again an establishment of Gods law as the canon for the church; and then an abandonment of it. When I say its establishment as the canon of the church, I should add as a canon for the nations, for all men in every sphere. The battle has raged back and forth. I do believe that we are on the verge of seeing a resolution of that struggle, as it has become apparent in this century increasingly what the fallacy of the Hellenizers is. The Hellenization of culture in the Western World, perhaps most systematically seen in education, especially in the English public schools, has brought disaster to the Western World, and as a result men are waking up to that evil. And the time has come for fresh appreciation of the clarity of the truth and of Paul’s vision.

Let us pray. Oh Lord our God, Thy word is truth, and Thou hast spoken; give us grace to hear, to obey, and to rejoice in Thy word and by Thy Spirit to go forth, to set Thy word into motion in our lives, and in the world around us, that it may accomplish that thing whereunto Thou hast sent it. Bless us ever in Thy service, in Jesus name, amen.

One announcement; next Sunday we have our potluck. If… you have an announcement? We are ready now for questions. David?

[Audience Member] How do you balance that, the (anti-millionaire?) argument that the Pharisees were the keepers of Gods law, and Jesus really horrified them because He was all the time breaking the Old Testament law?

[Rushdoony] Yes, but our Lord said that the Pharisees were not keepers of the law, that they had made the law of God of none effect by their traditions; and of course we know that by their traditions they replaced the law with their own decisions; very much as the Supreme Court has replaced the plain, open meaning of the founders of the Constitution with interpretations that they never imagined. Yes?

[Audience Member] What about the business of stoning adulterers and things of that sort in the Old Testament, is that part of the law?

[Rushdoony] Yes it is, not the form, but the fact. In other words, in the Bible the basic institution of society is the family; and so treason to the society was treason to the family. Now we have changed that. We have made the basic institution in society the state; so we have shifted treason from the family to the state, which is logical. Because if the key institution is the state, then treason is that which you do against the state; but we can see how, for example, even as recently as the time of Louis the 14th, Prince Eugene of Savoy, a relative of Louis the 14th, during his lifetime fought as a general on almost every side in European wars; and no one thought that he was a traitor when he came back to Versailles. That was not the essential thing, he had not betrayed anyone in the course of a war, he had gone where he felt the side offered the most to him, or where he felt that his personal interests were the greatest.

But today since we have an essentially statist society, treason is against the state. When we get back to a Biblical society where the foundation of society, the basic law institution is again the family, then again adultery will be treason because it will destroy the law center of the society.

Now, if you look at the Bible, most of the powers in society, in fact virtually all the great powers except the death penalty, are given to the family. So, anything which strikes at the family is fatal to the society. Hence, marriage then was something that was not casually entered in; it required a dowry from the man proving himself; there were all kinds of things that went back and forth in order to prove the character of both parties; because they were creating a governmental center which was all important.

I know that with my folks in the old country, both bride and groom had to provide data that there were seven generations without a birth defect. This was a minor aspect among many requirements before the marriage could be contracted, and it was a contract. And to this day among Orthodox Jews the marriage contract is a routine thing; if it should be destroyed in a fire, the couple must immediately separate until it can be re-written and certified as being accurate; because it is the governmental unit, and is so important.

Yes?

[Audience Member] We continue to hear today the comment from many theologians, that we live under grace; we don’t live under the law. And they will cite Christ’s statement of the golden rule, and loving God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself as being the summation of the law, and then they will also quote Paul in Galatians where he says: “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” That seems to be their out for establishing some kind of heavenly ground for conduct, but what precisely do they mean by that? Haven’t they made everything subjective?

[Rushdoony] Well, there are so many variations of the position that it would be very difficult to pin them down to one and say: “This is what they mean.” But essentially the antinomians want to reduce things to love, forgetting that when we are told in Romans that love is the fulfilling of the law, Paul also says that it is the fulfilling of the commandments; thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, and so forth. So that, to love your neighbor is to respect his right to life, his property, his family, his reputation, in word thought and deed.

So, love is not separated from the law, it is made one with the law by that statement, which they destroy; because they are bent on creating, after Marcion, an opposition between the two Gods, and therefore different dispensations. And therefore love has to be against law, and justice has to be against mercy, and grace, well; everything is isolated, as though all the attributes of God were at war with each other.

Now there can be war in our being, because we are not perfectly sanctified, but there cannot be any war in Gods being, between His justice and his grace, His mercy, His love, or anything. Yes?

[Otto Scott] Wouldn’t you say that there is a Judaizing element in the church again?

[Rushdoony] What would you say it is?

[Otto Scott] Well, for instance you brought up the business of it in the marriage contract. That has resurfaced here in the United States through social therapists, who are advising young people that they should draw up a contract in which the husband agrees to do housework equally, etc. etc. And there are other instances; many of the ethical arguments which I see in print appearing in general publications are really expressions of the Jewish ethic.

[Rushdoony] Well, now, we have to distinguish between what you described as the Jewish ethic, and Old Testament or Biblical ethics and law. If they believe that man is going to be saved by those contracts, that would be false; it would be Phariseeism, that would be Judaizing in the sense that it is used in the New Testament.

But if those are done because as Christians they believe that there should be some sound guidelines, that is different. I would say these therapists are not doing it out of any Christian motivation. But, yes, in that sense we would say that there is a belief in salvation by a law, because if two people without any character are going to make a contract, they are not going to live by the contract, they are not capable of doing it. But they are hoping that by works of law they are going to save their marriage. Yes I think your point would be valid, then. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Sanctification means growth in holiness, growth in faithfulness to God; yes, it is the new life in Christ, and growth therein.

[Audience Member] Would it be fair to say that it was the States responsibility to represent the family in cases of treason?

[Rushdoony] The state had a responsibility as a ministry of justice; I say a ministry of justice because we are all ministers of justice in whatever sphere we are; and the family is a ministry of justice, the school is, the church is, every agency has a responsibility, employers, to administer justice wherever they are. But the state is a ministry of justice with the death penalty; so that within a limited sphere it has jurisdiction.

Well, our time is up, let us conclude now with prayer. Our Lord and our God, it has been good for us to be here, for Thy word is truth, and Thy Spirit our guide, our shield, our defender. Bless us as we give ourselves by Thy Spirit to the study of Thy word and the things of thy kingdom.

And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.