Romans 3:21-25 (p. 1750)
Int.: Admittedly guilty, yet declared innocent.
In the early morning hours before dawn on July 2, 1839, African slaves aboard the Spanish schooner la Amistad freed themselves from their chains and rose up in rebellion against their enslavers.
Those Africans murdered the crew of the Amistad, leaving alive only the two men who had purchased them as slaves in Cuba, and demanded that they be taken back to Africa. Instead of sailing back to Africa, their owners sailed north from Cuba to New York, where the ship was taken into custody by the U.S. Navy.
A lengthy and complicated legal battle ensued. The Cuban slave masters sued for the Africans to be forced back into slavery, the Spanish government sued to have the Africans sent to Spain to stand trial for murder, the American who first reported the Amistad to the navy sued for salvage rights to the ship and its contents, the Africans sued their owners for assault and battery and wrongful imprisonment, and the U.S. government wished that it would all just go away because the lawsuits inflamed public opinion between the northern free states and the southern slave states.
The case was heard in several different U. S. courts, and the decisions were appealed by the president all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. On February 22, 1841 the Supreme Court began hearing the case. The Africans were represent before the court by former President John Quincy Adams, a staunch abolitionist and the foremost orator in America. Adams, a hero and mentor to U.S. Rep. from Illinois Abraham Lincoln, made an impassioned three-day long defense of the Africans before the court, which was made up of seven southern slave owners and two northern justices. On March 9 the court rendered its decision. It ruled, with a single dissenting vote, that although the Africans had indeed committed rebellion and murder to obtain their freedom, they were in fact free men who had been kidnapped and illegally forced into slavery. Thus, under U.S. law, and especially our Declaration of Independence, they had every right to rebel in order to obtain their freedom. The court then declared them innocent of all crimes and ordered them set free.
In the Apostle Paul’s words to the Roman Christians that is our text this morning, Paul refers to another judicial decree, this one in the Supreme Court of God Almighty.
In God’s court also the facts are not much in dispute. Our entire human race is on trial for high crimes against God in violation of his laws and commandments. There is no question of what we have done, or of our guilt under God’s law.
And yet, in a shocking decision that is much disputed and even challenged around the world to this very day, …
WE ARE DECLARED INNOCENT BY GOD.
I. We Are All Guilty As Sin Under The Law.
As the apostle says in our text, “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
It is very normal today for people to think of themselves as innocent victims – victims of the schemes and the wrong doings of others. There is nothing new in that delusion, it goes all the way back to the very first sin in the Garden of Eden! There Adam tried to defend himself from God’s question, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” with the accusation, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” (Genesis 3:11-12)
Did you catch the implications there? While admitting that he had eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam tried to blame Eve for giving him the fruit from the tree, and even to blame God for making Eve. Thus Adam gave the impression that he personally had done nothing wrong; he was simply the victim of the actions of others. What utter nonsense and blatant subterfuge! God’s question to Adam was a response to Adam hiding from God in shame – shame at his own sin.
The simple truth is that there were no innocent victims in Eden’s garden, and there are no innocent victims among our human race today. “All have sinned,” every last one of us. The Greek word that is translated as “sinned” in our text literally means “missed the mark.” It is a term from target shooting. The assumption in the term is that we were actually trying to be good and to keep God’s command, “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2) But no matter how hard we try and no matter how much we desire to be holy, we simply can not hit the target of holiness. That may be the assumption behind the word for sinned, but the reality is quite something else, for God himself says of our human race, “All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Psalm 14:3) In reality we don’t do good because we don’t even really try to.
St. Paul also says of our human race, “All … fall short of the glory of God.”
We may have our eyes on the prize of winning God’s praise and blessings, but we can never make it to the end of the course. Here the picture is of a racetrack that is simply too long for human endurance. The result is that people either give up part way down the track, or collapse from exhaustion before we reach the end. Thus the prophet Isaiah describes even believers with the lament, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” (Isaiah 64:6)
St. Paul himself decried our human condition when he said, “I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:21-24) Paul answered his own question when he declared, “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25)
II. God Presented Christ As A Sacrifice Of Atonement For Us.
Since there is “there is no one who does good, not even one” among our human race, God himself stepped into our history to do for us what not a single human being could ever do for himself or herself.
St. Paul told the Galatian Christians, “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law.” (Galatians 4:4-5) To rescue us from God’s curse upon our sins, God himself took our place under his law when he sent his own Son, Jesus Christ, into this world to live the perfect life before God that neither you nor I or any other person ever could live.
And Jesus did it! He lived the absolutely perfect life, overcoming every temptation that Satan, the sinful and seductive world around him, and even his own human flesh could throw at him. The epistle to the Hebrew Christians says of Jesus, “[He] has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) That is exactly what God had promised through Jeremiah the prophet over 600 years earlier, when he said, “In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD Our Righteousness.” (Jeremiah 23:6)
Jesus did more than earn our righteousness; he also made the payment that bought forgiveness of our sins – in full.
St. Paul says in our text that “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement.” This reference takes us back to the Old Testament ceremony of Yam Kippur, the great Day of Atonement. This was the high point of the Hebrew religious year. On that day two adult male goats were brought into the temple courts. One was selected by lot to be sacrificed for the sins of the people, and the other was declared to be the scapegoat upon whom the guilt for all unrepented sins was placed. The scapegoat was then led out into the wilderness to die.
The chosen goat was sacrificed and its blood placed into a golden bowl. Carrying that bowl of blood, the Hebrew high priest went into the Most Holy Place of the temple, and he smeared some of that blood on the four corners of the Mercy Seat that covered the Ark of the Covenant of God. This was the only time anyone was ever allowed to enter that Most Holy Place of the temple, and only for that ceremony. As a result of that annual sacrifice, God promised to grant forgiveness to his people.
But the blood of animals could never really take away sins, those goats and all the other animals whose blood was shed in sacrifice for sins were only symbolic of the blood of Jesus Christ, who was God’s true sacrifice for the sins of the world. The Apostle John says of Jesus, “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:2)
Because of that sacrifice made on our behalf by Jesus, St. Paul tells us in our text:
III. We Are Justified Freely By God’s Grace Through Faith In Jesus Christ.
The word “justified” that Paul uses in our text is a judicial term – it is the declaration of God’s court that we are “innocent” – innocent of all charges and innocent of all crimes.
But we are clearly not innocent before God by nature, nor innocent by our actions and deeds. The innocence that we have before God is a credited innocence – it is the innocence of the perfect Jesus, which God credits to us instead of to Christ. And in turn, God credits all of our sins to his own innocent Son! Then God sent Jesus to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins and thus to earn their forgiveness.
That, my friends, is the incredible good news of the gospel, the news of the vicarious atonement of our sins by Jesus Christ. This good news is an old story to you who hear it every week in this church, but it is good news that is found nowhere but in Christianity, and that is told in very few Christian churches at that. For the rest of our human race, there is either no hope at all, or the false hope of trying to earn salvation by being good enough to earn God’s praise and blessings. But as Paul says in our text, “all … fall short of the glory of God.” No human being is or ever can be good enough to earn God’s praise and blessings. That is precisely why God had to do it for us himself.
Now, “we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus, … through faith in his blood,” as Paul says in our text.
Salvation – forgiving our sins and declaring us innocent of all wrong, is God’s gift to us, a gift freely given to us as a gift of God’s grace. It is a gift that we accept from God through our faith in Jesus as our Savior-Redeemer. There is no way to get salvation from sin and death and hell except as a gift from God’s grace, and there is no way to receive this gift from God except through faith in Jesus Christ and the sacrifice that he made on our behalf.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day in America, a national holiday on which we remember and celebrate the sacrifice of those who laid down their lives to win or to protect our freedom. But the political freedom that those men and women whom we honor gave to us is nothing compared to the freedoms that Jesus Christ earned for us at the cost of his life. Make every single day a Memorial Day on which you honor Jesus Christ for the sacrifice he made to set you free – truly free to live forever with God himself.
Con.: Like those enslaved Africans on the Amistad who rebelled, we have been declared innocent in a shocking court decision. They were declared innocent by men, but WE ARE DECLARED INNOCENT BY GOD.
In truth, We Are All Guilty As Sin Under The Law of God, and have earned the sentence of death from God.
But in his love for us, God Presented Christ As A Sacrifice Of Atonement For Us. Jesus paid the debt of our sins for us.
We Are Justified Freely By God’s Grace Through Faith In the blood of Jesus Christ. That is the greatest freedom and greatest gift anyone can ever have. Thank God for his love! Amen.