Tag: Covenant justice of God

Good morning everyone.

You will probably be familiar with the idiom “That’s Greek to me” or “It’s all Greek to me”. We say this when we don’t understand something, usually technical, like a piece of legislation, or the terms and conditions page on a website, or science fiction jargon on a TV show like Star Trek. 

The idiom dates back to medieval times, and even Shakespeare used it in his play Julias Caeser, as you can see on the wall.

Today I’d like to look at Romans chapter 3 verses 21-24.  Romans was written by the apostle Paul, and it’s generally agreed that his audience was a group of small house churches in the city of Rome, and that the church members were a mix of Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus.

I’m reading from the New International Version, or NIV.

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

Now, if someone not familiar with the Bible or Christianity were to read this passage for the first time, they might say that this is Greek to them.  There’s a lot of jargon in here – the word righteousness, redemption, justified, and the glory of God.  Today I’m not going to try to explain ALL of these words, but I do hope to make this passage more understandable.

Just for fun, this is how verses 21-24 actually look in Greek.

As you might know, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and the Old Testament was written in Hebrew,  There are many, many English translations of the Bible out there, maybe as many as 450 according to Google AI. 

One translation of just the New Testament is called the New Testament for Everyone translation, or NTFE.  The NTFE was written by NT Wright and published in 2011.  NT Wright, also known as Tom Wright, is a UK New Testament scholar, former Bishop of Durham, and author of over 70 books. 

Let’s see how the NTFE translates verses 21-24 into English.

²¹ But now, quite apart from the law (though the law and the prophets bore witness to it), God’s covenant justice has been displayed.

 ²² God’s covenant justice comes into operation through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who have faith. For there is no distinction:

 ²³ all sinned, and fell short of God’s glory— 

²⁴ and by God’s grace they are freely declared to be in the right, to be members of the covenant, through the redemption which is found in the Messiah, Jesus.

As you can see, there are some differences between the NIV and the NTFE.

For example, in verse 22.  The NIV talks about God’s ‘righteousness’, and the NTFE instead talks about God’s ‘covenant justice’.   Also, the NTFE speaks of the faithfulness OF Jesus, rather than talking about our faith in Jesus, as the NIV does.  Why has the NTFE done this?   Hold that thought; we’ll get back to that in a few minutes.

For now, let’s imagine, about half an hour from now, you are walking out of church towards your car.   Someone named Julie has seen you come out; you don’t know her and she doesn’t know you.   But she’s feeling bold & brave today, and so asks you, “Can you explain what this church thing is all about?  Why do you believe in this stuff?  What’s so good about it?”

What do you think you would say?  How would you give a summary of the Good News? Would it go something like this? 

“Well, Julie, we believe in a God that created this earth, and you and me.  And he wants a relationship with us.  But you and I are sinners; we do wrong things, selfish things, have unclean thoughts and so on.   And that sin separates us from God; he’s pure and righteous and on the other hand we are not, and so He cannot have a relationship with us.  And our sin deserves death.  But God sent Jesus to die the death we deserved.  He sacrificed his life for us, for you.   That death cleans your sin so you can have a relationship with God and spend eternity with him in Heaven.”

Rom 3:21-24 in the NIV translation seems to line up well with your answer to Julie about what the Good News is.   It is also consistent with version of the Good News that many of us have learned since Sunday School when we were kids, or at least that’s true in my case. 

But I’d like us to consider whether Rom 3:21-24 is really talking about personal salvation, how you are personally made right with God.  Is that Paul’s main focus?  Or is Paul actually talking about something else here?

To answer this, let’s look at 3 questions. 

What does the word ‘sin’ mean?  What does Paul mean when he uses the Greek word for righteousness, or covenant justice.  And finally what does the Cross have to do with both of these? 

First, what does Paul mean when he talks about ‘sin’?   Well, Paul gives a list of sins earlier in Romans, at chapter 1 verses 29-31.  He says:

“They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

So this is one way to define sin – we could say sin is bad actions or thoughts.   For example, we could point to the first sin the Bible records, when Adam & Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis 3:6.  

Genesis tells us that God had created a perfect world, the Garden of Eden; chapter 1 says that food was provided, and it seems Adam didn’t need to work for it.  And God created community – he said that it was not good Adam to be alone so he made a partner for relationship and intimacy.  Further, God himself was there, wanting to be part of that community.   Genesis 3:8 says that God was walking in the garden.  God himself.  Extraordinary.   

God also gave humans the task of caring for God’s creation.   It must have been incredible to live in the Garden.  It was an early version of God’s kingdom on earth.

But Adam & Eve for some reason were not satisfied.  They thought maybe there was something better out there,

In English, we have the saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side”.  In Persian, which is spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, the equivalent saying is “The neighbor’s chicken is a goose”.   Behind the saying is the truth that it’s not necessarily the case that everything on the other side is perfect.  Among Afghan refugee friends of mine who moved to America in the 1990s to escape civil war, I saw disillusionment play out; they had thought they would find a golden goose in America, but it was often harder than they had imagined.

With Adam & Eve, despite all that God had given them, I wonder if they thought there was another side that was greener.   Maybe their hearts were restless, not thankful for what they already had.  “I want to try this thing over here; maybe that will give me more happiness, more knowledge, more autonomy….”  That’s what the serpent was whispering to Eve – that if you eat the apple, you’ll be like God.

This is idolatry – giving more worth to something other than God’s kingdom.   It is a root sin, a foundational sin, or what I like to call sin with capital S.  Eating the apple, or for us, stealing or having hate or arrogance, or a love of money or whatever it is, these are ‘sins’ sure, but they are only the fruits of the root problem, idolatry.

What happens when we give our hearts to something?  That thing comes to have power over us, like an addiction.  Jesus talks about how one can’t serve God & money, and how we can become a slave to money if we aren’t careful.  When that happens, our hearts turn away from God and his kingdom – and further apart from each other.    

Do we appreciate what we have already, for example God’s creation, the nature around us?  Do we appreciate the signs of God’s kingdom already here on Earth, the amazing work of theologians and doctors and scientists and teachers, many many of them motivated over the centuries to learn about and serve God’s creation. 

Will gave a sermon some weeks ago on the parable of the weeds and the wheat.  Yes, some things are awful – we do need to work to restore those things that are broken.  But I think we also need to rejoice in those things that are beautiful and are working well, due to God’s grace and the servants, the human beings, he has worked through.

If we don’t appreciate and put value on God, his creation and each other, if we have the mindset that there are other things that would be better for me to pursue, then idolatry can take over.

Romans 1:19-20 says God’s goodness and his kingdom way of doing things had been plain to us humans, but verse 21 says we did not thank him, and set out on a different way.

And so God GAVE us OVER to the things you see on the wall, sinful desires, shameful lusts and a depraved mind.  (Romans 1: 24, 26, 28.)  Does this mean God actively pushed us into sin?  No, this is rather like the parable of prodigal son who was un-thankful, who dishonoured his father by demanding his inheritance early, wanting to get away from his father and live a different life, and his father, much as it pained him, letting his son go. 

Just like the prodigal son, when society turns away from God, the power of sin takes over and we become poor, lonely, alienated and broken.

So what was God’s solution to this?  Well, he could have snapped his fingers to re-create the Garden of Eden.  He could have overpowered our wills so that all humans would immediately love and value him again.

But he did not do this.  Instead, he chose to partner with humans, to work together with us to set things right, to restore Eden, to restore his presence, to restore his kingdom. 

After the Adam and Eve story, Genesis goes on to describe how God entered into a covenant with Abraham and his descendants – that all nations would be blessed through the people of Abraham.  God gave the people of Abraham a vocation to restore the world, to set the world right.

As we read on in the OT, Israel did partially fulfil that vocation – we see glimpses here and there of people outside of Israel coming to know God – but mostly we see sin with a capital S holding Israel back, and causing them to fail in its vocation.  The power of Sin was too great, and so they were largely unfaithful to God and their covenant purpose. 

But God did not give up.  He gave the Law to order their society well, and he gave instructions about how to build a tabernacle, and then a temple, so that his presence could dwell among his people.

From beginning to end, the Bible shows us a picture of God wanting to live among us here on Earth.  God walking in garden in Genesis, and then the tabernacle & temple in the age of Israel’s judges and kings.   And then Jesus comes and is called Emmanuel, meaning God with us.  Jesus himself taught us to pray for the kingdom of God to come down to earth, and heaven and earth coming together will finally and fully happen according to the last two chapters of Revelation.

Going back to the vocation God gave Israel through the covenant with Abraham.  Again and again, Israel was failing and floundering in that vocation, and it got so bad that they were exiled to Assyria, ending the time of the kings.  But still, God used prophets to give his people hope and to show them he still loved them.  Eventually, the exile ended; they returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple.  Throughout the Old Testament, we see God’s faithfulness to the Covenant of Abraham.   In other words, we see God’s covenant faithfulness, despite the covenant Unfaithfulness of Israel. 

This is the story Paul is telling in Romans chapters 2 through to chapter 3 and our passage which I’ll get to shortly.  At Romans 2:17 Paul says:

 (17) Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God…

 (19) if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark…

(21) you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal?….

(24) God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you   

Paul is saying that Israel has a vocation,,, to be a guide for the blind (that is the Gentile world)….but so far they have largely failed because the power of Sin has been too great, and so God’s name has been blasphemed among the Gentile nations.  Romans 3:9 says that Jews & Gentiles were both under the power of sin. 

But now, Paul says in 3:21.  But now, here’s the solution to the power of sin.  But now the righteousness of God has been made known. In other words, righteousness is the solution, or as Tom Wright puts it in his translation, God’s covenant justice is the solution.  As we saw before, the two translations are different.  Why the difference? 

Well, the word in Greek that the NIV translates as righteousness is Dikaiosyne.  (D-kai-o-SUU-neh).  This word in Greek can mean morally right, virtuous, being a good person.  But it also can mean justice, fairness and equity. 

Many of us are familiar with Micah 6:8, which says:  What does the Lord require of you? To act justly [mishpat] and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. 

To act justly, to act with justice, comes from the Hebrew word mishpat.  When the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek, probably in the 3^rd or 2^nd century BC, the Hebrew word mishpat in Micah 6:8 was changed into Greek using the word Dikaiosyne.

And when the Bible speaks of God’s justice, it is not far from the idea of God’s love for humanity.  Justice and love are not opposites, but go closely together.

Tom Wright says in his book “Into the Heart of Romans”:

“When the Bible speaks of God’s justice, it is talking about the creator’s utter determination, faced with his creation in a mess, to put it all right.  When it speaks of God’s love, it is talking about the creator entering into a ‘covenant’, a close personal relationship, with his people – as the means by which he will put the world right.  Paul draws on this combined meaning explaining throughout [Romans]…how God has been faithful to his covenant…by which he is putting the world right.”  (page 14).  

See also endnote 1

To capture this idea, Tom Wright uses the phrase ‘covenant justice’ in some of his books and in his NTFE translation of Romans 3. 

Humanity was sinful and therefore broken, but now a new ‘setting things right’ has happened, aligned with the covenant faithfulness of God throughout the Old Testament that we’ve been talking about.  Covenant justice is the putting into operation of God’s covenant faithfulness.

Where is this covenant justice placed?   How does it come about?   Precisely in Jesus the Messiah; his life death and resurrection.  Verse 22 – God’s covenant justice comes into operation through the faithfulness of Jesus. 

In other words, God has set things right through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The problem of sin with a capital S, the problem explained in Romans 1 and 2, has been dealt with through the covenant justice put into operation by Jesus.

Verse 25 reiterates the same idea, that God’s demonstration of his covenant justice is found in the cross of Jesus, who was faithful to the point of shedding his blood. 25 says: 

God put Jesus forth as the place of mercy, through faithfulness, by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his covenant justice

I began this sermon thinking about what ‘Good News’ we might say to Julie outside of church, and I included a line about God sending Jesus to die for my personal sin, and then I raised the question about whether that was in fact the message of our passage in Romans 3.    What I’ve tried to suggest today is that in this passage, Paul is not so much talking about Jesus being killed in my place for the bad things I’ve done, but rather he’s talking about the Cross dealing with sin with a capital S, breaking the power of Sin and death, so that we are now set free to take forward the vocation he had given Israel to set the world right. 

Now, how does Jesus’s death actually ‘deal with sin’ in that way?  How does it actually break Sin’s hold on me, on us?  That’s a puzzle that I’ve agonised over for the last 2 or 3 years and which I’m still working through – I don’t know if I’ve quite solved that puzzle completely.

But I think part of the answer is to imagine what happens, or should happen, in my heart when I look on Jesus, when I look on that cross with amazement at what he did, and grapple with what it all means, and if I soak it all in with the help of the Holy Spirit, should it, and will it, make my heart sing and set me free?

About 25 years ago when I was in seminary, I read a book by Paul Fiddes called the Creative Suffering of God, and when I read the passage from his book that I’m about to show you, I think I did feel the Holy Spirit opening my eyes to something new about the cross.

In the book, Paul Fiddes speaks of death in a wider way than just physical death.  For him, it’s also a loss of relationship, it is alienation.  He explains how God experienced that death throughout the Old Testament, and then experienced death in his own being as the Son was separated from the Father at the Cross. 

Now, Paul Fiddes, being a good and proper British theologian, tends to use very dense language that can hurt your brain and make you reach for a tall cup of coffee, so I asked Google AI to paraphrase it for us into simpler English.

Saying God defeats death does not mean death just disappears. It means that when God exposed Himself to death through Jesus, death was unable to destroy Him. Instead of being ruined by this dark power, God used the experience to show His character.

Because death could not break Him, it now belongs to Him and leaves a permanent mark on who He is.  We cannot think of God without remembering that He experienced death, and we cannot think of death without realising it failed to shatter God.

While God has always encountered and overcome death throughout human history, the death of Jesus was the ultimate demonstration of this. It was the deepest moment of isolation and pain God ever experienced.

This terrible event actually became the clearest message about who God is. It shows that God willingly chooses to share in our deepest loneliness and suffering, which naturally moves us to trust Him more.

This connection changes everything for humanity. When we choose to trust God, death loses its aggressive power and control over our lives.

Finally, the resurrection of Jesus acts as a powerful sign. It proves that even when faced with absolute finality, God does something new for his creation in the face of finality and death.

See also endnote 2

Tom Wright says this:  “The answer to human idolatry, the root of sin, is the fresh revelation of the one true God.  God has supplanted the idols worshipped by Israel and the nations alike with a fresh revelation of himself.” (Page 332 – The Day the Revolution Began)

And because those chains of sin have fallen off you and me, we are now free to join with God in doing “something new for his creation”, as Paul Fiddes says in his book.

I spoke earlier about God being in the business of ‘setting things right’.  Further on in Romans 3, verses 24 and 26 suggest that through Jesus, we are now ‘in the right’ – we are now Abraham’s family, and so can join in God’s business of ‘setting things right’.  We can take on the Abrahamic vocation of being a blessing to the nations. 

We can restore what is broken in our communities, we can restore our environment, we can celebrate and reflect divine creativity through art and music, working now, today towards that vision at the end of Revelation when a new heavens AND NEW EARTH will be realised, when heaven and earth finally come together, when God himself will again walk among us, just as he did in the Garden of Eden and in the life of Jesus.

If I were to meet a Julie coming out of church today, that would be the Good News I think would tell. 

End Notes

1. Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel also writes:  “It would be wrong to assume that there was a dichotomy of mishpat and kindness.  [Quoting R Niebuhr] ‘Justice was not equal justice but a bias in favour of the poor.  Justice always leaned toward mercy for the widows and orphans’ ….Justice dies when dehumanized, no matter how exactly it may be exercised.  Justice dies when deified, for beyond all justice is God’s compassion.  The logic of justice may seem impersonal, yet the concern for justice is an act of love.”  Page 201, The Prophets Vol 1.

• The actual words from Paul Fiddes’ book are:  “..to claim that God conquers non-being, or the death which has become an alien power through the fall of creation…means that God is not destroyed by it [the power] when he exposes his being [Jesus] to it.  Instead, he uses it [death, or the alien power] to define his own being, and in this way makes death serve him…..The point is not what has happened to alien death, but what has happened to God in confronting it, in terms of alienation….  Such death now belongs to God… it leaves a permanent impression upon his life.  This means that we cannot think of God except as one who has experienced death, and we cannot think of death except as the power which could not shatter God….So God uses death to define his being.”

“Throughout human history…God has been encountering death and making it serve him.  But the depth of alienation God experiences in the death of Jesus, means a corresponding clarity of definition….The most dreadful assault of non-being has become the most articulate word about God… [We] encounter God as the one who participates in our estrangement, and this has a persuasive power, moving us to trust him.  In our trust of God, non-being loses its aggressive power over us….[and the] sign of the resurrection of Jesus affirms that God does something new for his creation in the face of finality and death.”  Pages 265-267, The Creative Suffering of God.