A Study of Romans 3:22-24
Opening: The quantum vacuum exhibits fluctuations due to zero-point energy, influencing virtual particle pairs that momentarily emerge and annihilate. These fluctuations, in turn, contribute to the Casimir effect, producing an attractive force between uncharged conductive plates.
I confess I didn’t understand a word of the previous sentence. It’s from the world of physics, and I was never great at that subject. I don’t know what some of those terms mean. But that’s how terms like justified, righteousness, redemption, propitiation, or the law and the prophets feel to a theological beginner or to someone new to the Bible.
All those terms show up in the passage we’re coming to today in the book of Romans—and it is the linchpin passage of Scripture—Romans 3:21-31.
Scripture
21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus….
Review: When we open to Romans, we read the prologue in the first seventeen verses, and then the next portion of the book is devoted to the reality of the wrath of God coming upon every single person on earth because of our sinfulness. Romans 3:19 and 20 say, “The whole world [is] held accountable before God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”
The next two words should be bolded, highlighted, and written in golden letters: But now…
This is where Paul turns from the bad news to the Good News; from wrath to grace; from despair to eternal optimism. This is where he pulls the chain and turns on the light. He says: But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
Paul is telling us here that we cannot attain heaven or eternal life without grace. None of us are good enough. Even the best person on earth, the most giving, the most gracious, the most sacrificial, the most loving person on earth is also flawed by failure somewhere in life. No matter how hard we try or how good we think we are, we cannot bear the holiness of God. But that’s why He has provided another way for us to know Him and love Him and be with Him throughout eternity. When we simply trust Jesus Christ as our Savior, we receive the gift of His righteousness, and that makes us holy and pure and pristine in God’s sight.
Paul goes on to say in verses 22 through 24: This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Here we run into five theological terms, so let’s break them down—sin, glory, justified, grace, and redemption.
Sin
First, Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned….” What exactly is sin? When Paul wrote this in the original Greek language, he used the word hamartia. It comes from a root meaning of “to miss the mark.” It’s the picture of someone with a bow and arrow, and the archer misses the bullseye. In fact, he misses the whole target.
What is the bullseye? What are we aiming at? What is the goal? It is to reflect God’s glory, but we miss the mark. We have all sinned and our arrows, our lives, fall short of His glory.
Glory
The glory of God is the perfection of all His attributes, the holiness of His character, the brilliance of His presence. God is something like the sun at the zenith of the sky. In fact, the Bible compares God to the sun. Psalm 84:11 says, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield.” Isaiah 60 says that while the sun will one day cease to shine, the Lord our God is an everlasting sun, an everlasting light.
In Malachi 4:2, we’re told the coming Messiah will be the Sun of Righteousness who will arise with healing in His rays. In Revelation 1:16, we’re told the face of the glorified Christ Jesus is like the sun shining in all its strength.
Now, suppose someone gave you a heavy-duty bow and some arrows. They told you that your life depended on your hitting the target they indicated, and that if you fell short of the target you would be killed. What if they told you the target was the sun. You had to shoot the arrow into the sun—all the way to the sun, 93 million miles away.
That’s exactly what Paul is saying here. All have shot the arrow and missed the mark; we have fallen short of the glory of God.
Justified
But we are justified…! The word “justified” is from Paul’s Greek term dikaioo, which comes from the root word for “righteous.” So this word literally means “to declare righteous.” Almighty God looks at you, He sees how sinful you are, He sees how far the arrow of your life has missed the mark, and yet He says to you and to me, “I am declaring you righteous. Pure. Perfect. Sinless.” This is a legal, forensic term, drawn from the courtroom.
Justification is the judicial act of God whereby He declares the believing sinner to be righteous on the basis of what the pure and perfect and sinless Christ Jesus did for us. It is a once-for-all declaration that can never be overturned.
Let me read again verse 24 in its entirety: …and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “This Is undoubtedly one of the great verses of the Bible. It is a statement that can be compared with John 316. It is the perfect synopsis of the Christian faith… An understanding of this verse is indispensable…. It is one of those essential statements of the Christian faith, and every word is of great importance.”
Justification is the action of God declaring us to be just people. When you are justified, God takes all your sin and lays it on Christ; and He takes all Christ’s holiness and overlays it on you, and He declares that you are now just, righteous, holy, and pure in His sight.
We are justified freely….
God does this for us freely. It’s a gift, giving willingly. He does this enthusiastically. He does it because of grace—and that’s the next word: grace. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace….
Grace
Grace is the Greek word charis, which means kindness. God is kind to us. He is good to us. He looks on us with favor and goodwill. This seems to be Paul’s favorite word. He uses it far more than anyone else in the Bible. For example, let me give you some of His phrases and sentences:
- Through Him we received grace…
- Through Him we have gained access by faith into this grace…
- The gift…came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ
- I always thank my God for you because of His grace given you in Christ Jesus.
- We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.
- It is by grace you have been saved…
- By His grace [He] gave us eternal encouragement and good hope…
- This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time…
- For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people
- Having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.
Grace is a word that contains all the riches of God’s forgiveness, His love, His underserved kindness, His wealth, His inheritance for us—all His paradise, all His fellowship, all His eternity, forever—all of it ours and freely given, though we absolutely do not deserve it.
Grace is the storehouse of every spiritual blessing in Christ, the treasury from which God pours His mercies without measure. This word encompasses all God’s promises, and it guarantees all His protection. It includes the answer to all our prayers, the fulfillment of all our hopes, and the resolution of all our circumstances, for grace is God’s willingness to involve Himself in every detail of our lives.
Grace is the power that lifts us when we fall, sustains us when we are weary, strengthens us when we are tempted, and comforts us when we grieve.
It is the countenance of God shining over our days and the foundation beneath our feet when the world shakes. He lives in our hearts by grace, and we will live in His house by grace; and throughout the endless ages of eternity, we will never exhaust its riches, never reach its far horizon, never comprehend its depth. Grace will be the theme of our praise, the song of our souls, and the atmosphere of heaven forever.
Someone said that grace is God stepping into our story.
On my playlist, I have an old song we used to sing because of its rousing exuberance.
Wonderful grace of Jesus, greater than all my sin;
How shall my tongue describe it, where shall its praise begin?
Taking away my burden, setting my spirit free;
O the wonderful grace of Jesus reaches me!
Wonderful the matchless grace of Jesus,
Deeper than the mighty rolling sea;
Wonderful grace, all sufficient for me, for even me.
Higher than the mountain, sparking like a fountain,
All sufficient grace for even me.
Broader than the scope of my transgressions,
Greater far than all my sin and shame,
O magnify the precious name of Jesus
Praise His name!
I tell about the background of that hymn in my book, Then Sings My Soul. This is the gist of it. Haldor Lillenas was a young pastor in the tiny town of Ollie, Iowa. He and his wife Bertha were almost penniless. They couldn’t even afford a piano. Wanting some way to make music, Lillenas bought a worn-out, secondhand pump organ from a neighbor for five dollars. Its bellows wheezed, its keys clicked, and it looked as tired as the little parsonage in which it sat. I recall my grandmother had an organ just like this in her home in Elk Park, North Carolina.
One afternoon, as he pumped the pedals and reflected on the goodness of God, a beautiful melody began to rise out of that humble instrument. At the same time, a set of words began to arise in Lillenas’ mind—words about the wonderful grace of Jesus, reaching the most defiled, lifting the burdened, and setting the sinner free.
In that simple room, on that little organ, one of the most exuberant gospel songs of the twentieth century was born. Lillenas later said he felt the hymn was “given” to him in that moment. And isn’t that exactly what grace is? God taking the poorest places of our lives and filling them with His music.
By the way, we have indications that he managed to sell his new hymn to a publisher for somewhere around five dollars—which paid for the organ.
Redemption
So that deals with the words sin, glory, justified, and grace. But Paul throws in another term here—redemption: …for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
The root meaning of redemption is to deliver or ransom by the paying of a price. Someone is in trouble, or they are in bondage, or they are trapped or enslaved. There is no way out for them. No hope. But a redeemer shows up and pays a price and the trapped person is freed. The idea is liberation. We have many examples of this in history.
For example, Charlotte Brooks was a slave in Louisiana in the 1800s. She had endured decades of bondage, but the greatest pain of her life came when her children were sold away from her, and they too went into slavery in different places. For years Charlotte longed to be with her children and she prayed that somehow God would open a path for her family to be restored.
Around this time, ministers and abolitionists connected with the American Missionary Association visited the region. The American Missionary Association was founded in 1846 in Albany, New York, by a coalition of evangelical Christians—mainly Congregationalists, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, and Free Will Baptists—who believed that slavery was a sin to be opposed, and that the Gospel required helping those oppressed and bringing Christ to them.
The representatives from the AMA met Charlotte and learned of her story. They raised the money through church gatherings, abolitionist supporters, and Christian donors who believed that redeeming a captive was a Gospel-shaped act. Together they raised about a thousand dollars, which was a staggering amount in the 1850s (equivalent to more than $35,000 today). With this money, they purchased Charlotte’s freedom, completing a legal act of redemption. But they didn’t stop there.
The same Christian network then raised additional funds to buy the freedom of her children, locating them and negotiating their release so that Charlotte could be reunited with the family torn from her. Newspapers of the time recorded Charlotte’s reunion with her children as one of the AMA’s most joyful successes—an act of redemption in a literal sense: a price paid so the captive could go free.
This is redemption. This was the apostle Paul’s special term for salvation.
F. F. Bruce said, “Among Paul’s soteriological terms [that is, words having to do with salvation] redemption stands out as one of his favorites for describing the saving work of Christ.”
Another commentator, Leon Morris, wrote, “In Paul the word [redemption] is used in its full theological sense. He has made it one of his characteristic words to denote the great deliverance accomplished by Christ.”
In Galatians 3:13, Paul said, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us….”
In Titus 2:14, he said, “[Christ] gave himself to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own….”
In Ephesians 1:7, he wrote, “In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins….”
This concept comes from the Old Testament. There this word was used to describe Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt. The Lord said in Exodus 6:6, I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.”
Deuteronomy 7:8 says, “…the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”
But what was the price paid for Israel’s redemption? Redemption is the act of freeing someone from slavery or bondage by the paying of a price. So what was the price God paid for the redemption of Israel out of Egypt?
It was the Passover Lamb! The Passover Lamb, which prefigured Christ. One commentator said, “The Passover Lamb was the God-given ransom-price for Israel’s deliverance. Its blood, laid upon the doors, was the means by which God redeemed His people from judgment and released them from Egypt.”
Douglas Stuart in his commentary said, “The Passover ritual was not a mere symbol. It affected redemption. The lamb’s blood was the price by which the firstborn of Israel were spared and the people became free to leave Egypt.”
J. Alec Motyer wrote, “The death of the substitute lamb lay at the heart of Israel’s redemption. Their freedom cost the life of another.”
Dr. Christopher J. H. Wright said, “Israel’s salvation lay in the shedding of blood. The Passover lamb bore the judgment that otherwise would have fallen on Israel’s firstborn. Here is the price of redemption in the Exodus story.”
To me this is incredible—that the Old Testament and the New Testament, though written centuries apart, by different authors, in different settings, are two streams flowing from the same divine reservoir. They breathe with the same life. They tell the same story. They agree in every essential respect.
What begins as a shadow in Genesis becomes a silhouette in Exodus, grows into a figure in the Prophets, and stands before us in full daylight at Calvary. As someone beautifully said, “The New is in the Old contained, and the Old is in the New explained.”
Nowhere is this unity clearer than in the theme of the Lamb. In the Old Testament, a lamb appears again and again at decisive moments—Abraham on Mount Moriah, the Passover night in Egypt, the sacrifices in Leviticus, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 who was led like a lamb to the slaughter. Each appearance carries the same message: An innocent lamb must die so the guilty may go free.
Then, when the curtain of history parts in the New Testament, Jesus steps onto the stage—and John the Baptist introduces Him by saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
The blood on the doorposts becomes the blood of the cross. The promise becomes a Person. The foreshadowed lamb becomes the bleeding Savior. What the Old Testament anticipated, the New Testament accomplishes.
This seamless connection is one of the greatest evidences of the Bible’s truthfulness. How could dozens of authors, across a millennium of time, in different countries and cultures, all point to the same saving figure with such accuracy unless guided by the same divine Author? Only God could weave this tapestry—from Exodus to Golgotha, from the lamb in Egypt to the Lamb on Calvary. And only God could make both Testaments speak with one voice: salvation comes through the blood of the Lamb.
No wonder the concept of redemption was one of Paul’s favorite ways of viewing the experience of salvation. He goes on in Romans 3:25 to state it even more clearly.
Redemption is God’s gracious act of delivering His people from bondage—whether physical, spiritual, or eternal—through the payment of a costly price, fully accomplished by the blood of Jesus Christ as our Passover Lamb and applied to believers now and consummated at His return.
Now, let me ask two questions: From what are we redeemed? According to Galatians 3:13, we are redeemed from the curse of the law. Romans 5:9 says we are redeemed from God’s wrath. Romans 6 tells us we are redeemed from sin’s dominion. And Hebrews 2 tells us we are redeemed from the power of death. In other words, we are redeemed from the effects of our own sinfulness.
The other question is—from whom are we redeemed? To whom is the ransom paid? It is not to Satan. The ransom was a sacrificial offering to God that satisfied the righteous demands of His justice. Leon Morris said, “The ransom was not paid to Satan but represents the price paid to meet the demands of God’s righteous law.”
John Stott said, “We must not ask to whom the ransom was paid; the question misleads us. Christ’s death was a self-sacrifice offered to God to satisfy His justice and secure our release.”
Conclusion
You and I may never understand all the big words used by scientists, physicists, physicians, or philosophers. But as followers of Christ, we need to understand the biblical vocabulary—words like sin, glory, justified, grace, and redemption. And then we can sing Fanny Crosby’s great song:
Redeemed! How I love to proclaim it!
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.
Redeemed through His infinite mercy—
His child and forever, I am.