03/13/2022 – Day 014 – Romans – Chapter 3 & 4 – Commentary / “God’s Righteousness Through Faith”
I am going to share short excerpts from WIlliam Barclay’s “The Letter to the Romans” Copyright 1975:
Romans 3: 1-8:
“To the end of the day he believed the Jews to be in a special position in regard to Go. That, in fact, is what they believed themselves. The difference was that Paul believed that their special position was on of special responsibility; the Jews believed i to one of special privilege… The more opportunity a man has to do right, the greater his condemnation if he does wrong… When a man sins, the need is not for ingeunity to justify his sin, but for humility to confess it in penitence and in shame…”
Romans 3: 19 – 26:
“… He uses a metapor from the law courts which we call justification. This metaphor thinks of man on trial before God. The Greek word which is translated to Justify is diakioun. All Greek verbs, which end in -oun mean, not to make someone something, but to treat, to reckon, to account him as something. If an innocent man appears before a judge then to treat him as innocent is to acquit him. But the point about a man’s relationship to God is that he is utterly guilty, and yet God, in his amazing mercy, treats him, reckons him, accounts him as if he were innocent. That is what justification means…
Now a man must try to be good and keep God’s law, not because he fears God’s punishment, but because he feels that he must strive to deserve that amazing love. He strives for goodness, not because he is afraid of God, but because he loves him. He knows now that that sin is not so much breaking God’s law as it is breaking God’s heart, and, therefore, it is doubly terrible.”
Romans 4: 1 – 8:
“…Here again, we have the root cleavage between Jewish legalism and Christian faith. The basic thought of Christianity is that all a man can do is to take God at his word and stake everything on the faith that his promises are true…
Abraham is not the father of those who have been circumcised; he is the father of those who make the same act of faith in God as he made. He is the father of every man in every age who takes God at his word as he did. This means that the real Jew is the man who trusts God as Abraham did, no matter what his race is…. The descendants of Abraham are not the members of any particular nation, but those in every nation who belong to the family of God.”
Romans 4: 13-17:
“…Paul saw with absolute clearness that his Jewish attitude had completely destroyed the promise. It had done so for this reason — no man can fully keep the law; therefore, if the promise depends on keeping the law, it can never be fulfilled… The trouble about law has always been that it can diagnose the malady, but cannot effect a cure… If we introduce law and stop there, if we make religion solely a matter of obeying law, life consists of one long series of transgressions waiting to be punished…”
Romans 4: 18-25:
“… The essence of Abraham’s faith in this case was that he believed that God could make the impossible possible… When we realize that it is not our effort but God’s grace and power which matter, then we become optimists, because we are bound to believe that with God nothing is impossible…”