Just and the Justifier

Romans 3:21–26

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it — the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

One of the more popular TV dramas of the 2010s was FX’s neo-Western crime drama Justified. Set in present-day Kentucky, the series follows the ruggedly handsome Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens (portrayed by Timothy Olyphant), who employs his own Wild West style of justice that makes him a severe nuisance both to his U.S. Marshall superiors and to the criminals he is tasked to pursue. Why our culture is drawn to characters like Givens (apart from their being so ruggedly handsome) may have something to do with a shared, deeply felt longing for a brave hero who is willing to step outside the conventional boundaries of law and order and set right the scales of justice that our established institutions have so often mishandled and abused. From an even more current perspective, these themes may also continue to resonate because the internet and social media culture have presented us with a modern Wild West justice system — a system that is uniquely capable of exposing previously concealed or ignored injustices on an unprecedented scale, but also a system that is somewhat unwieldy and even at times merciless in its application of justice, often without due process and without offering any opportunity for restoration. Maybe this is why the Wild West vigilante or plays-by-his-own-rules detective is such a timelessly satisfying archetype: because if you look closely enough at any human society for any amount of time, you will realize that the mechanisms for executing justice have always failed and faltered, and something deep inside us longs for that rugged hero who will cut through the red tape, pull away the veneer of false peace and propriety, and truly set things right, even if his hands get dirty in the process.

What makes these stories compelling on TV but messy in real life is that as humans, not one of us is righteous enough to take matters of justice entirely into our own hands, as the Bible (v. 23) and experience both teach us. When we take justice upon ourselves, we quickly find that we are just as unqualified to apply it fairly and evenly, and when we lift up our own paragons of righteousness and impartiality, these heroes let us down time and time again with personal moral failures, mixed motives, and just basic humanity. According to the passage, Jesus isn’t exactly the Wild West vigilante hero we long for. He does offer us a form of righteousness that the even most scrupulous adherence to the letter of the law — whether the Mosaic Law (as v. 21 refers to with an uppercase L) or the equally rigid and ever-shifting moral codes of our own society (lowercase “L” law) — can’t seem to offer us. But whereas the Wild West hero punishes the villain and claims the ransom or receives due payment for setting things right, the mystery of the Gospel of Jesus is that our hero does the reverse: rather than merely dispensing the punishment and taking the payment, He provides the payment (what v. 25 calls a “propitiation”) and takes the punishment on Himself (“by his blood”). The justice that we so long for is satisfied by a God who is at once “just and the justifier” (v. 26). He is just in that he does not leave debts unpaid or wrongs unpunished, and he is the justifier because he provides a way for us, the guilty, to walk in freedom and righteousness. This is good news for a world that yearns for justice, and it is good news for sinners who desperately need to be justified.