“But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the Law and the Prophets. The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Everything has been building to this. For six weeks now, we have been working through Paul’s indictment of sin and sinners. It’s been eye-opening and bruising. Paul doesn’t let anyone escape the conclusion that everybody’s guilty. He even reemphasizes it here. But into this mess of guilt and sin, God offers us a way out. This is the good news. We may all be lawbreakers in one form or another (but not degree; we are all lawbreakers of the same degree because there’s only one degree), but God has provided a way out that doesn’t involve our keeping the law. Let’s start talking about this very good news.

The Law can’t save us. Our rules can’t save us. No amount of effort on our part will ever be enough to make us right with God. You can try as hard you can to get right with God, with whatever alternative concept of God you have adopted for yourself, with simply all of the other people in your life, but you’re not going to be able to do it. And even if you do manage to feel like you’ve hit that mark, you are not going to be able to maintain it for very long. Eventually, you’ll do something to hurt the other person or to incur some sort of guilt.

What’s more: you know this. I don’t have to convince you of anything here. At least, you don’t if you are capable of and willing to be totally honest with yourself. You know that you’ve said a cross word to somebody you love. You’ve been selfish with a stranger. You’ve driven over the speed limit. You’ve ignored or allowed to stand an injustice that you had the power to effect in some way. And you’ve felt badly for doing whatever it was that you did. To use the language we find consistently used across the Scriptures, you have sinned. But even if you don’t want to use that precise word because it sounds too religious for you, you have committed some sort of a moral transgression at some point in your life, and you know it. You’ve been in a place where apologizing to another person was the right thing to do, and you know it.

The rules didn’t save you. Once again: they can’t do that. They’ve never been able to do that. The righteousness of God – the state of being in a right relationship with Him and with other people – was inaccessible by the means you were using to pursue it. That’s the hard news of the Gospel that we have spent the last eight weeks talking about. The good news is that there’s another way.

“But now,” Paul gloriously declares in Romans 3:21. The contrasting coordinating conjunction is one of the most powerful words in any language. It’s pronounced day in Greek. It’s such an important word because whatever lies on the other side of it is radically different from what comes before it. What comes before the but is one thing. After it, everything is different. The Law was once the only means people understood they could be right with God. “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed…”

In other words, there is a way to be right with God and with others that doesn’t involve the Law, a law, or any other type of rule system. If you feel like you have to do this or that in order to be right with God, the odds are good that you are exhausted from trying. Maybe you’ve already given up trying, decided you’re just not going to be able to be right with God, and are living your life however you please. You’ve become a law unto yourself. Even so, you still aren’t happy with yourself all the time. But now, there’s a way to experience God’s righteousness, to take on God’s righteousness, to benefit from God’s righteousness that doesn’t require any sort of rule.

The thing about this new way of being right with God is that it wasn’t something God snuck in on the people at the last second. It may have been a new thing, but it wasn’t a surprising thing. God had been telling people He was going to do this for a very long time. It was “attested by the Law and the Prophets.” God had been dropping clues that He was going to do something new for hundreds of years by the time Paul was writing. Isaiah talked about it. Jeremiah talked about it. Ezekiel talked about it. Moses pointed the people toward it. For people who truly grasped the spirit of the Law, they understood that it was coming. The time had come to its completion, and now this new thing was available. “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the Law and the Prophets.”

So then, how do we access it? “The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Faith is the means by which we access the righteousness of God. More specifically, it comes by faith in Jesus, the Messiah, the one anointed by God to announce and inaugurate God’s new covenant with people. The way to get right with God is to believe in Jesus, to accept the historical claims made about Him as true and right. The two most important historical claims are that He rose from the dead and that He is Lord. When we do that, the righteousness of God becomes something we can have for ourselves. It is a gift of grace through faith. We place our faith in Jesus and God gives us His righteousness.

How exactly this works is something Paul is going to explore, and us with him, in the coming weeks. For now, we can say this. It works because Jesus fulfilled the Law. He kept all the rules. He did what we could not, and He did it on our behalf. When the time was right, He made Himself the sacrifice we couldn’t offer without losing our lives. He gave His own perfect life back to the Father on behalf of our lives. God accepted His offer as an exchange for us, and with His justice now satisfied was able and willing to offer access to His kingdom, to His righteousness, to eternal life to all those who are willing to accept that what Jesus did was efficacious on their behalf. God’s wrath was satisfied, and God’s grace was available.

The real wonder of this new way Jesus has made available to us is that it is perfectly equitable. There is no distinction that comes with it, Paul says. Because everyone has sinned, because everyone has fallen short of the standards of God’s righteousness, everyone is eligible to accept this offer of grace. Paul famously puts it like this: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Everyone has sinned (or, if you don’t like that word, pick the word you are comfortable using to describe the moral wrongdoings common across all humanity), and so everyone can access this justification that is available in Jesus.

When it comes to using a set of rules to save us, one of the many problems is that everyone doesn’t have equal access to them. If rules are what are going to save us, then everyone needs to know the rules. All of them. That’s hard to implement. What’s more, everyone has to be physically capable of keeping them. All of them. And, really, there has to be just one system of rules. If there are two systems of rules available, if they are not exactly the same, then there are two different ways of getting right with God. More than that, one way will be easier than the other. That’s not fair. If people only have access to the harder set of rules, fewer people are going to be right with Him because not as many will be able to meet with the higher and harder standard. That’s unjust. If you have more than two sets of rules, then the difficulty here is magnified by however many standards there are. The injustice is magnified as well.

God is not a God of injustice, though. So He made a better way: Jesus. Everyone is able to put their faith in Jesus. There aren’t any exceptions to that. There’s no better way. There’s only one way that is open and available to everyone. And, God makes sure that everyone has access to this way. He does that through missionaries who take the news of the Gospel to people who have never heard it. This is why there has always been such a strong missionary emphasis to the Christian faith. But He’s not limited to those means. There are all kinds of stories, especially from out of the Muslim world, of people who have never heard of Jesus, having visions and dreams of Jesus, and starting to follow Jesus, even at risk to their own life, because of their vision or dream. God is just. He is not going to condemn anyone unjustly. He will use all of the means available to Him – and He has all of the means available to Him – to give everyone a chance to hear this good news and to positively respond to it.

And the result of taking this new way is redemption. We are redeemed from our sin. Jesus Christ purchased our redemption so that we don’t have to be controlled by sin any longer. We can freely receive His grace and the life and freedom that accompany it. This is indeed good news. It’s the best news ever.

There’s a lot more to come in the days ahead. But for now, let us simply marvel at the wonder of what God has done and is doing through Jesus to make possible a right relationship with Him.