Romans 3:28

Romans 3:28

I. What was the point which lay at the root of St. Paul's whole argument? It was this: whether obedience to the ordinances of the Jewish law could be deemed necessary to salvation, whether it should be required of Gentile converts, whether there were anything in it which was to be held in conjunction with faith in Christ, or whether it were all done away by Christ, and declared by His Cross and Passion to be incapable of making a sinner righteous before God. This question has now for us faded in the dimness of distance; rejoicing as we do in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, we can perhaps hardly understand that such a question should be argued, much less that it should form the grand point of discussion in any age of the Church. Yet so it was in apostolic times. A very little consideration shows us why it was so, and why it was necessary for the due establishment of the Church that the question should be set at rest at once and for ever. To do this was one of the great tasks entrusted to St. Paul; himself a Jew, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as touching the law a Pharisee, he nevertheless, by the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit, saw with a keenness of view, which seems to have been vouchsafed to no other apostle, the error and danger of allowing any word of the law, be it what it might, to be regarded as in any way co-operating with the Lord Jesus Christ for the justification of man. It is in connection with such a view of the subject that St. Paul uses the words of the text.

II. Doubtless we must all strive with our hearts and souls to keep God's law; but the real question is, in what light we are to regard all works of righteousness, all obedience to God's law, all efforts to do good, all submission of our will to His, with reference to the pardon of our sins and our entrance into eternal life? And the answer is, that we do wrong if we allow ourselves to consider for a moment how much obedience, how much doing of good, how complete an abnegation of self, will entitle us to God's favour. No amount will do this. It is only when a man realises his position as redeemed freely by the blood of Jesus Christ, as adopted into God's family for no merit of his own, that he can serve God with perfect freedom, and consider all that he can do as nothing in comparison with what has been done by God's grace for him, and return love for love, and cry out in the spirit of adoption, "Abba, Father."

Bishop Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons,5th series, p. 320.

References: Romans 3:28. G. Salmon, Sermons in Trinity College, Dublin,pp. 206, 224; S. Leathes, Preacher's Lantern,vol. iv., p. 415; S. Martin, Sermons,p. 57.