This week I had a couple of phone calls from a woman in jail. She had been given my number by another inmate as someone who might be able to help her. She’s an American who wants to move here, but when she went into the immigration office and they did a background check on her they found something wrong, so they detained her on what’s called an “immigration hold” and sent her off to jail. She wanted me to vouch for her that she was alright so they would let her out. Unfortunately, I don’t know her so I can’t vouch for her. So I was unable to help.
Over the past year I’ve been in court a number of times for various reasons, and I’ve been to the jail a couple of times too. One of the basic ideas behind the legal system is the idea of righting wrongs, putting things right when they’ve been messed up.
I have a friend who ran a small business making something he designed himself, called a “canoe leg.” It’s a rack that fits on the back of a pickup so you can carry a canoe horizontally (rather than sticking up in the air), and it lets you load the canoe by yourself, and get into the truck bed with the canoe loaded. One of his distributors took a whole bunch of them, then refused to pay for them. That was wrong of him. So my friend had to take him to small claims court to get his money and set things right.
You try to avoid
going to court. Jesus tells us as much in Matt 5.25, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is
taking you to court. Do it while you are still with him on the way, or he may
hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and
you may be thrown into prison. 26 I tell you the truth, you will not
get out until you have paid the last penny.”
Going to court means that the relationship has broken down and you’re no longer able to work things out between yourselves, so you need to bring in a judge to sort things out. Going to court is an admission that something is seriously wrong.
That’s even more true for criminal court. When you end up in criminal court it’s because you’re accused of breaking the law and, if you’re found guilty, the court has to figure out some way for you to, as they say, “repay your debt to society.”
Over the last few weeks we’ve been following a series called “CrossTalk.” We’ve been looking at why Jesus’ death on the cross is so important to Christianity. We started off asking the question, “What’s the problem?” and we saw that the problem is us, that we’ve turned our backs on God and broken our relationship with him, with each other and with creation.
Then we began looking at some of the metaphors that the Bible uses to talk about the cross. We looked at “ransom,” a metaphor from slavery and the marketplace, the idea of paying a great price to set someone free. Then we looked at substitution, a metaphor from the temple worship, where something (a lamb or a goat in the Old Testament) or someone else (Jesus in the New Testament) dies in our place.
And the reason I started off talking about courts this morning is because this week we’re going to look at a metaphor from the legal world. It’s a metaphor that has kind of overshadowed all the rest, at least for the last 500 years or so.
In his letter to the church in
In the first three chapters of Romans he builds a case, much like a lawyer would do, to show that everybody is far from God, whether they’re Jews or Gentiles. Jews would normally have accepted that Gentiles (non-Jews) were far from God, but they would have said that they were different, they were God’s special people. So in his closing argument in Romans 3.9-18 Paul quotes various passages from the Psalms and Isaiah, which are talking about Jews, to make his point.
9 Well then, are we
Jews in any better condition than the Gentiles? Not at all! I have already
shown that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10
As the Scriptures say: “There is no one who is righteous, 11no one
who is wise or who worships God. 12 All have turned away from God;
they have all gone wrong; no one does what is right, not even one. 13
Their words are full of deadly deceit; wicked lies roll off their tongues, and
dangerous threats, like snake’s poison, from their lips; 14 their
speech is filled with bitter curses. 15 They are quick to hurt and
kill; 16 they leave ruin and destruction wherever they go. 17
They have not known the path of peace, 18 nor have they learnt
reverence for God.”
This is where we were a few weeks ago when we asked, “What’s the problem?” This is a description of all of us at some time or another. At some time or another we have all lied, or hurt people, we’ve all turned our backs on God and chosen the path of strife rather than peace.
So, how do we get past this? What’s the solution? Paul has pulled all of us (Jews and Gentiles, religious people and non-religious people) up before the court and laid out his charges. How are we going to get out of this mess? How are we ever going to set things right?
Maybe I could get a plea bargain. How about I plead guilty to some of the charges? How about verses 13 and 14? “13 Their words are full of deadly deceit; wicked lies roll off their tongues, and dangerous threats, like snake’s poison, from their lips; 14 their speech is filled with bitter curses.” I’m a talker, and if you talk a lot you’re much more likely to twist the truth or hurt people with your words. So, yes, I’ve probably done all those things at some point. But not verse 15, “15 They are quick to hurt and kill;” I’m not a violent person, and I’ve certainly never killed anybody. So how about I plead guilty to the 13 and 14 and get off on 15?
Never mind that Jesus says that if I hate someone in my heart it’s the same as if I’ve murdered them. Leave that to one side for now. Paul says, 19 Now, we know that everything in the Law applies to those who live under the Law, in order to stop all human excuses and bring the whole world under God’s judgement.
James says it really well in James 2.8, 8 If you really keep
the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you
are doing right. 9 But if you show favoritism, you sin and are
convicted by the law as lawbreakers. 10 For whoever keeps the whole
law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11
For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If
you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.
It doesn’t matter if I only break the law in one place. It’s still broken and I’m now on the wrong side of it. How do I get back to the right side?
Maybe if I just tried to do better from now on. Maybe if I did community service and helped people more. Maybe that would fix things and get me back on the right side.
Verse 20 says, 20… no one is put right in God’s sight by doing what the Law requires
I don’t get brownie points for doing what’s right. I should be doing that anyway. As Jesus says, we’re supposed to love God and love our neighbour. The legal system may take community service into consideration, but it isn’t a way of earning an easier sentence. It’s supposed to be evidence that you’ve changed and that you’d be better off in society than in jail; that if the judge extends grace then he or she won’t regret it. We’re supposed to help each other anyway. We all know that deep inside, all that the law does is give us an external reminder. As Paul says, what the Law does is to make people know that they have sinned.
So what’s the solution? Here we are. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a “good person” or a notorious criminal, we’re all guilty. We can’t plea bargain. And, even if we never sinned again for the rest of our lives (if that were possible), we would still have all the stuff we’ve already done to deal with. When things are that wrong, how do you even begin to set them right? When the way we’re living is so upside down, how do we begin to set it right side up?
The answer is; we don’t. God does.
21 But now God’s way of putting people right with himself has been
revealed. It has nothing to do with law, even though the Law of Moses and the
prophets gave their witness to it. 22God puts people right
through their faith in Jesus Christ.
[I grew up on the North Sea coast of
We are not self-righting people! We cannot turn ourselves right side up.
I said that we’d painted ourselves into a corner and there’s no way we can get out by ourselves; like the guy in the Nescafe ad who builds a shed around himself and forgets to make a door. So what does God do? He comes along with a crane, and he lowers a rope and says “hang on to the rope and I’ll pull you out.” Of course you have to trust him when he says that. You have to trust him that he’s not going to pull you out and then drop you from a great height. The name of that rope is “Jesus,” and all we have to do is trust him when he says it will take our weight. That’s what faith is; trust. Trusting God that he’ll do what he says.
God does this to all
who believe in Christ, because there is no difference at all: 23everyone
has sinned and is far away from God’s saving presence.
God does this to all who believe in
Christ, because it’s everyone’s problem. He doesn’t
have a particular group of people that he decides he wants to save and the rest
can go to hell in a hand basket. That’s what Paul’s fellow Jews thought; that
God loved them more than others and that the rescue plan only applied to them.
But Paul is clear. It’s everybody’s problem; verse 9, Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin, verse 12, All have turned away from
God. And, because it’s everybody’s problem, the
solution is for everybody; verse 22, God does this to all who
believe in Christ, verse 24, But by the free gift of God’s grace all are put right
with him through Christ Jesus, who sets them free.
That’s why everybody receives it the same
way, as a free gift, like verse 24 says, But by the
free gift of God’s grace all are put right with him through Christ
Jesus, who sets them free.
[I helped somebody out once. I did him a favour. It took me five days. A couple of those were 20 hour days. I didn’t mind. I had offered to do it because I could. This person needed help and I had a flexible schedule. Then at the end, when everything was done, he turned to me and handed me 50 bucks. I hadn’t asked for anything. I hadn’t expected anything. I had done it for free. But when he handed me the money I felt hurt and insulted. I felt like he had just taken the free gift of my time and effort and make it cheap and dirty.]
Nothing we can give God can come even close to the value of the free gift he gives us in Jesus. If we try, it just cheapens the whole thing. All we can do is accept it in faith and believe that he will keep his promise to make us right with him.
Now, if you’ve grown up in church you’re quite possibly sitting there nodding your head. “Yep, that’s right, ‘Justification by faith.’” If that’s the case, it’s kind of sad, because it might mean that you’ve lost your sense of wonder at what God has done for us. A more natural response would be, “Wait a minute. What’s the catch? That’s too good to be true. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody has to pay.” Or even, “What kind of God lets people off free? That’s not very just. Where would we be if judges behaved like that?” After all, Paul is using a legal metaphor and legal language in this passage.
So how does God get around that? How can he offer salvation as a free gift?... Because he has dealt with the cost of our salvation by taking the burden of guilt upon himself.
25-26God offered
him, [that is, Jesus] so that by his blood he should become the means by which
people’s sins are forgiven through their faith in him.
In that one sentence Paul pulls in the ideas of Jesus as sacrifice, as substitute, as redeemer, as ransom. Metaphors we’ve looked at over the last few weeks.
This is why studying the Old Testament is so important. Paul could make this statement because he was steeped in the Old Testament. But without the revelation of God’s character as gracious and loving; without the story of the Exodus, where God unilaterally stepped in to save a community for himself; and without the background of things like the sacrificial system and the “kinsman redeemer” that we’ve talked about over the last few weeks, Jesus’ death simply wouldn’t have made any sense. There would have been no metaphors or categories to make sense of it. It would just have been a terrible tragedy, a miscarriage of justice. As it is, Jesus’ death on the cross is the fulfilment of hundreds of years of preparation that God had put in place.
What about the justice issue? The next sentence
says, God did this in order to demonstrate that he
is righteous. In what way? Well, because In the past he was patient and overlooked people’s sins.
Christians often talk as if God does a quick change act somewhere between Malachi and Matthew. You’ll hear people talk about “the Old Testament God” as if he were somehow different from “the God of the New Testament,” as if God changed how he dealt with sin somewhere along the line.
It ain’t so. In the Old Testament, God set
up a system of sacrifices so that he could forgive people’s sins, even though
there was no way that an animal could take a person’s place in any real
way. But, as it says, he was patient and overlooked people’s
sins; until Jesus could come and fulfil all those sacrifices so that, in the present time he deals with their sins, in order to
demonstrate his righteousness.
God doesn’t just ignore our sin and say
it’s all right. That would make a mockery of justice. It would be like telling
Paul Bernardo to go home and be good. He deals with our sin by taking them upon
himself, then asks us to put our trust in him so that we can be set right
again. And this is how God shows that he himself is
righteous and that he puts right everyone who believes in Jesus.
One of my early teachers told a story of when he was in seminary. He had a professor who was quite antagonistic to the gospel as it has been understood by most of the church for most of history. At one point in class the prof kind of sneered and asked, “What kind of God would require a sacrifice for sin?” And went on to talk about how “primitive” and “unsophisticated” that idea was. My teacher was a young guy at the time and pretty intimidated by his professor, so he didn’t respond. But the question stuck with him.
Forty years later, when I was in his class, he said he wished he had been able to respond to his professor with the understanding that he had eventually come to. “What kind of God would require a sacrifice for sin? A just and holy God. What kind of God would give himself as that sacrifice? A gracious and loving God.”
In Christ’s death on the cross, God’s justice and holiness meet his love and grace, and all of them are fulfilled.