How Does the Gospel Save Believers? Part 1 CLICK HERE FOR MP3

By John Piper August 9, 1998

Romans 1:16-17

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to

the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is

written, "BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH."

Verse 16 says that "the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." Back on June

21 I argued that what this means is not that the gospel is God's power to convert people to faith (although

that is indeed true!), but that it means the gospel is God's power to bring those who keep on believing to

everlasting safety and joy in the presence of God.

Our Ultimate Problem: The Wrath of God

One of the things we did not make plain in that message was why we need salvation. Salvation from

what? What's the problem? The answer in the book of Romans is resoundingly this: We need to be saved

from the wrath of God. Look at Romans 1:18, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all

ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." This is given as the

reason why we need saving. God is very angry at our unrighteousness and the way we suppress and

distort the truth to justify ourselves.

Or look in the next chapter, Romans 2:8, to see another glimpse of this. Paul says that "to those who are

selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness (notice those two words again, as

in 1:18 - "truth" rejected and "unrighteousness" embraced), [God will render] wrath and indignation." This

is our problem. God is indignant and wrathful toward us in our unrighteousness and our untruthfulness.

Or back up just three verses to Romans 2:5, "Because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you

are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God."

God's wrath is a righteous judgment. When we are unrighteous, God's righteousness blazes out with

wrath and indignation. He is not to be trifled with.

This is what we need saving from in the end. This is our ultimate problem: God's final wrath that

separates us from himself and casts us into hell. If you ask the book of Romans, what do we need to be

saved from, the answer comes back - yes, from sin; and yes, from guilt; and yes, from disunity and bad

relationships; and yes, from destructive habits and harmful ways; but mainly the answer is: We need to be

saved from God's wrath. Our ultimate problem, though very few in the 1990s see the problem, is that we

are sinners in the hands of an infinite, omnipotent, angry God.

Gospel: God Has Rescued Us from the Wrath of God

The gospel is mainly the good news that God himself has rescued us from the wrath of God. Not mainly

from ourselves and the mess we make of our lives; but from his own anger and his own righteous

judgment. The gospel is the power of God for salvation from the wrath of God - the power that brings us

to eternal safety and joy in the presence of God.

You see it perhaps most clearly of all in Romans 5:9. "Much more then, having now been justified by His

[that is, Jesus'] blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him." In the end, it's all about

escaping the wrath of God, or, having the wrath of God turned away from us, so that he becomes a

friendly King and not an enemy.

So when verse 16 says, "The gospel is the power of God for salvation," it means that the gospel is God's

power to rescue believers from the "wrath of God," or from "the righteous judgment of God" (2:5)

How Does the Gospel Save Believers?

Now the question in today's sermon is, How does the gospel save believers? How is the gospel God's

power for salvation? And the answer is given in verse 17. Maybe we can feel the force of this verse by

translating it incorrectly and making it say what we might expect it to say, but what it does not say, and

then go back and do it correctly. Let's read it incorrectly. Starting at verse 16, "For I am not ashamed of

the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to

the Greek. For in it [the love] of God is revealed from faith to faith."

Now that is not what it says. But that is where the emphasis for many of us falls, when we think about the

gospel. The gospel is the good news, we say, because in it the love of God is revealed. And indeed it is.

Romans 5:8 says, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for

us." That too is the gospel. The gospel of Jesus is a demonstration and revelation of the love of God for

sinners. But that is not what verse 17 says.

Now there are two simple reasons that I put it this way - why I start with a wrong translation. One is to

make plain that the love of God could not just sweep the unrighteousness of man and the wrath of God

under the rug and pretend all is well. The love of God had to deal with man's unrighteousness and had to

deal with God's wrath. The love of God is not a sentimental thing that can just say, "I feel nice to you, and

so I will now be nice to you." If that were true, the book of Romans would have been a lot shorter than it

is. Indeed the Bible would have been a lot shorter, and we could have skipped the gruesome story of the

death of the Son of God.

The love of God is a love full of wisdom and a love full of justice and a love full of truth. It is a love that

upholds all the other attributes of God, rather than blotting them out. The love of God is worked out wisely

and legally and justly and truthfully - nothing hidden, nothing suppressed. It takes our unrighteousness

and God's righteousness into account, and deals with them in the death and resurrection of Jesus. How it

does that is what this book is mainly about.

The other reason I begin by mentioning what Paul does not say is to stress that Paul must want

Christians to understand how they will be saved from the wrath of God. He must want us to know more

than just that God loves us and sent Jesus to die for us. Think about this! It is so simple and so plain.

Evidently it matters to Christ and to his inspired apostle, Paul, that Christians learn how the gospel is the

power of God for salvation. Because he tells us how - in verse 17, and then for sixteen chapters he tells

us how!

A Strong Understanding of the Gospel

Why do I stress this? I stress it because it is simply unbiblical that so many Christians today have such a

weak grasp - a weak understanding - of what our human condition is without grace, how God planned our

redemption, what God did in Christ to save us, how the Holy Spirit worked in us to convert us, and how

God goes on working (by the gospel!) to keep us and purify us and fit us for heaven. These are the things

that the New Testament (especially Romans) is at pains to teach Christians, and it is stunning how many

Christians simply do not care to know these things and therefore do not know them.

So I am stressing that in verse 17, instead of saying, "God saved us by his love and that's all you need to

know," Paul begins to explain for us how the gospel saves believers. He does not just say, "It shows the

love of God." Paul gets inside the love of God and shows how God deals with the real problems of the

universe. We begin to learn what the real issues of the universe are. And they are deeper than we think

they are - not the bombing of embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam - but far deeper than that. There is

an enmity against God and a suppression of truth and a deep unrighteousness of soul and the almighty

wrath of God behind such things that only one power in the universe can overcome - the gospel of Jesus

Christ.

Starting at verse 17 Paul moves inside the love of God and inside the gospel to show us how the gospel

is that kind of power. And he writes this way because we Christians need to know these things. I'm not

asking you to take a course in theology. I'm asking you to read and care about the inspired word of God in

Romans 1:17. Christ sent his apostle to teach us how the gospel saves believers and brings them safe to

heaven.

This is what you are going to want to know when the doctor says, "We've done all we can do." And you

say, "How long do I have?" And he says, "A week? Maybe two" - and then face to face with the Maker

and Judge of all the universe, infinite in holiness and unswerving in justice. O my beloved Bethlehem, this

is what you are going to want to know. How can I persuade you and win you to care about the most

important things in the world?

The Comfort and Privilege of Understanding How God Works

I plead with you to get serious about growing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:10) and how he saves

the unrighteous. If God inspired Paul to tell us, we ought to want to know. And what a privilege to know!

And a comfort to know! What a joy to know! This series on Romans is a golden opportunity - a precious

window of time. We are moving slowly so that you can think and study and read and discuss and review

and check things out and pray over what you hear. This series has the potential of taking you deep into

the heart and mind of God - if you want to go there. I plead with you: Do not be passive, don't coast. Make

the thought of this letter the thought of your mind. Build your whole way of thinking and feeling out of the

building blocks in this great letter.

So this morning, would you ask with me this question: How does the gospel save believers? How does

the gospel powerfully bring us to eternal safety and joy in the presence of God when what we really

deserve is God's wrath, which verse 18 says is already being revealed from heaven? How will the gospel

triumph in those last two weeks of your life to rescue you from despair and terror, and bring you home to

God?

The answer of verse 17 is this: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes

because "in it [that is, in the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith."

Now here is the puzzle. How can this be good news when the righteousness of God is our problem? The

fact that God is righteous and I am unrighteous is the problem. His wrath is being revealed against the

unrighteousness of man, verse 18 says. Martin Luther said he hated Romans 1:17 before he figured this

out. He wrote,

I had . . . been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the

Romans. But . . . a single word in Chapter 1 [verse 17], 'In it the righteousness of God is revealed,' stood

in my way. For I hated that word 'righteousness of God,' which . . . I had been taught to understand . . . is

the righteousness [with which God] punishes the unrighteous sinner. (John Dillenberger, ed. Martin

Luther: Selections from His Writings, [Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1961], p. 11)

God Gives to Us What He Demands from Us

So how is this good news - that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel? Here's the answer:

God demands righteousness and we don't have it, so the only hope for us is that God himself would give

the righteousness that he demands. That would be good news. That would be gospel. And that is what he

does. What is revealed in the gospel is the righteousness of God for us that he demands from us. The

reason the gospel is the power of God for salvation - the way that the gospel saves believers is that in it

God reveals a righteousness for us that God demands from us. What we had to have, but could not

create or supply or perform, God gives us freely, namely, his own righteousness, the righteousness of

God.

This is how the gospel saves us from the wrath of God. You see in verse 18 that "the wrath of God is

revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." So what is our rescue? What

is our hope to escape this wrath when we are ungodly and unrighteous? The answer is that God would

intervene and supply us with a righteousness that is not our own. That he would give to us the

righteousness he demands from us. If God would do that, then his wrath would be averted and we could

be reconciled to him. And that is, in fact, what he did. And that is the gospel. That is the way it saves us.

"The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes," because in it God offers to us

what he demands from us, namely, his own righteousness. He reveals as a gift in Christ Jesus what was

once only a demand. This is how he saves: in the gospel of Jesus' death and resurrection God gives to us

the righteousness that he demands from us.

Now there is two more Sunday's worth of good news in this verse. Next Sunday we need to ask, What is

this gift of God's righteousness? 1) Is it the vindication of his own justice in the punishment of our

substitute, Jesus? 2) Or is it our right standing with God as forgiven and acquitted sinners without guilt in

his presence? 3) Or is it the moral transformation in us that actually changes our nature into obedient,

righteous children of God? Or is it all three?

And the Sunday after that, we must ask how faith figures into this saving revelation of the righteousness

of God. What does the phrase "from faith to faith" (verse 17) mean? And how does the quote there from

Habakkuk 2:4 help us embrace all this great truth by faith?

But to close today I want to go back to Martin Luther. Maybe God will use his testimony to bring some of

you from mere hearers this morning to those who love and live on this gospel reality of God's gift of

righteousness. You remember he said he hated Romans 1:17. But he goes on explaining his struggle with

his own guilt and fear before the righteousness of God.

Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at

[Romans 1:17], most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God,

meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, "In it the righteousness of God

is revealed, as it is written, 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'" There I began to understand

[that] the righteousness of God is . . . righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith. . . .

Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. (Martin

Luther: Selections, pp. 11-12)

O how I pray that many of you will find this verse a pathway into paradise.

How Does the Gospel Save Believers? Part 2 CLICK HERE FOR MP3

By John Piper August 16, 1998

Romans 1:16-17

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to

the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is

written, "BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH."

The Gospel Saves Believers

We are asking the question, How does the gospel save believers?, not: How does the gospel get people

to be believers? When spoken in the power of the Holy Spirit, the gospel does have power to open

people's eyes and change their hearts and draw them to faith, and save them. That's what is happening

on Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights this summer. People are being drawn to Christ through the

power and beauty of the gospel. But I am stressing what Paul says here in verses 16 and 17, namely,

that "the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." Believers need to be saved.

The gospel is the instrument of God's power to save us. And we need to know how the gospel saves us

believers so that we make proper use of it.

Notice the link between verses 15 and 16: "So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also

who are in Rome." Who is this "you"? Verses 6-7 tell us: ". . . among whom you also are the called of

Jesus Christ; to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints." So he says in verse 15 that he is

"eager to preach the gospel" to these called, loved, saints whose "faith is being proclaimed all over the

world" (v. 8). Why? Verse 16: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation

to everyone who believes" (literally: who is believing) namely, you. And, namely, you Bethlehem

believers.

I say it with Paul: I, John Piper, am eager to preach the gospel to you who believe - exactly to you who

believe - because this gospel which is laid out in the book of Romans, is the power of God to save you.

You believers need to hear the gospel in order to be saved. And Paul labors mercifully for 16 chapters to

tell us the gospel and how it works to save believers.

Believers Are Dependent on the Gospel Every Day

And I fully believe that the reason he does is that when believers know and love and live on the meat of

the gospel, we will be so gospel-filled and gospel-shaped and gospel-dependent and gospel-driven and

gospel-hoping and gospel-joyful that no one will need to tell us why we need to share the gospel or how

to share the gospel. We will be so thankful and so desperately, day-by-day dependent on the gospel for

our own hope of eternal life, and our own sanity, and our own stability, and our own marriages or

singleness, that it will be impossible not to know that people need the gospel and why they need it and

how it relates to their biggest needs - because we know we need it, and why we need it, and how it meets

our biggest needs day by day.

One of the great reasons Paul was so eager to preach the gospel to believers (verse 15) and why I am so

eager to preach his gospel to you, is that, if we thrive day-by-day on the meat of the gospel - if the gospel

becomes a day-by-day, hour-by-hour instrument of God's power in our lives to save us - then our witness

to family and friends and strangers will not be an artificial scheme but the very heartbeat of the way we

think and feel and fight the fight for faith and love every day.

Paul was utterly convinced - and we should be too - that preaching the gospel to believers would bear

fruit. Look back at verse 13: "I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to

come to you (and have been prevented so far)so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as

among the rest of the Gentiles." When the gospel is preached among believers there will be fruit! All kinds

of fruit. Righteousness, peace, joy (Romans 14:17) - and converts who hear and see the gospel from the

people of God.

How Does the Gospel Save Believers?

So I am focusing on verse 17 for three weeks because verse 17 answers the question: How does the

gospel saves believers? If we believers are going to live on the gospel, this is how we do it. We learn from

God's word how the gospel is going to save us, and then we believe it, and yield to it, and cherish it, and

follow God's design day by day for how he plans to save us from everything that would destroy us,

especially the "righteous judgment of God" (Romans 2:5) and the wrath to come (Romans 5:9). That's what

"salvation" refers to mainly in verse 16: "The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who

believes." Those who go on believing, year after year, will be saved from wrath by the power of God in the

gospel (see Mark 13:13).

How? How does the gospel save believers from the wrath to come, and bring us safely into the joy of our

God (Matthew 25:21,23)?

Verse 17 says it works like this: "The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes

because in it - in the gospel - the righteousness of God is revealed." We saw last week that Martin Luther

at first hated this verse because he thought the revelation of God's righteousness was not good news, but

more bad news. It's the righteousness of God that creates our problem: we are unrighteous and suppress

the truth (Romans 1:18). So we are under condemnation by the righteousness of God.

God demands righteousness from us. That's his nature and what his law demands. He is righteous. But

we don't have it to give. So we are guilty and condemned and perishing, alienated from God and without

hope in the world. So what's the good news? What's the gospel? The good news is that the righteousness

which God demands from us, he gives to us. That was last week's point. That is what verse 17 means:

the gospel is the power of God to save believers because, day by day, all through our lives, we see

revealed in the gospel of Christ's death and resurrection the gift of divine righteousness that supplies to

us what God demands from us.

What does "The Righteousness of God" Mean?

Then I asked at the end, What does this gift of God's righteousness refer to? I mentioned the three

possibilities that seem most likely to me. So today I want to show you which of these I think Paul means

and why.

Does the righteousness of God mean: 1) the vindication or demonstration of his own righteousness in

forgiving sin because he punishes that sin in our substitute, Jesus? 2) Or does he mean our right

standing with God as forgiven and acquitted sinners without guilt in his presence? 3) Or does he mean

the moral change in us that actually makes us obedient, righteous children of God?

Now we are going to see over time in Romans that all three of these are, in fact, true meanings of God's

righteousness, and that it is part of the gospel that all three of them are free gifts for us, obtained by the

death of Jesus in our place. And it may be that Paul has all of them in mind in verse 17: the righteousness

of God - in all these ways - is being revealed in the gospel to faith; and that is why it is the power of God

to save believers. It's true that we see in the gospel, day by day, all that is needed for God to be

righteous, and to declare us righteous, and to progressively make us righteous. That's what the gospel

reveals to us day by day. That is what we grasp hold of by faith. That is what keeps us believing and

helps us fight the fight of faith and persevere to the end and be saved.

Our Right Standing Before God

But there are several reasons why I think Paul's main intention in verse 17 is the "righteousness of God"

in the sense of our right standing before him as forgiven, acquitted sinners without guilt - in other words,

as people who are justified, or declared righteous because the righteousness of God has been imputed to

us. In Christ, we now have a right standing with God. God imputes to us his own righteousness even

while we are still ungodly. He counts us as having his righteousness. That's what I think verse 17 mainly

refers to. That's what is revealed in the gospel.

Here are my reasons:

1. God credits his righteousness to man

Notice the connection between the first part of verse 17 and the last part, the quote from Habakkuk 2:4.

"For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith." Then comes an Old Testament quote

introduced with "as it is written." In other words, what he has just said about the righteousness of God

being revealed in the gospel is as - is like - what he is about to quote from Habakkuk 2:4, namely, "BUT

THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH."

Do you see what has happened to the word "righteousness" (or "just," which is the same in Greek)? In the

first half of the verse, the righteousness is God's ("the righteousness of God is revealed"), but in the

second half of the verse the righteousness is man's ("the righteous man shall live by faith"). How can Paul

give an Old Testament quote to illustrate his point if there is such a huge difference in the use of the very

words he wants to compare? The answer is that there is not a huge difference. This quote from the Old

Testament shows that what Paul has in mind when he speaks of the gospel revealing "the righteousness

of God" is not mainly that God himself is righteous, but that he imputes or credits his righteousness to

man so that man can be called "just" or "righteous." "The righteous man," he says, - the one who is now

righteous because of the gift of God's righteousness - "shall live by faith."

So what verse 17 means is that, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed in the sense that we

see it being given to sinners so that we are justified - have a right standing with God. What we can't

provide on our own, God imputes to us so that we are forgiven and acquitted and justified before him.

Now, there is another reason to see verse 17 this way. So add to this one the following one.

2. God's righteousness is manifested through faith

Here's my second reason for thinking that this is what Paul has in mind in verse 17. Turn with me to

Romans 3:20. The parallel between these next verses and Romans 1:17 is so close that I can't help letting

these verses guide how I fill out the shorthand of 1:17.

Romans 3:20: "By the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the

knowledge of sin." So you see that the issue here is how sinners are "justified." That is, how do we get a

right standing with God when we have no righteousness of our own? How do we get acquitted in the

courtroom when we are guilty sinners? Then he continues in 3:21 with words that are very close to

Romans 1:17, "But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God [same phrase as in 1:17] has been

manifested [very close to the word "revealed" in 1:17], being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets." So

he explains "justification" (verse 20) as a "manifestation of the righteousness of God" (verse 21). And he

continues to do so in verses 22-24, which shed bright light on the "revealing of the righteousness of God"

in 1:17.

He says (please try to see all of verses 22-24 as one piece) that this righteousness that is now

manifested is "even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for

there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His

grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus." In the flow of Paul's thought, the phrase "being

justified as a gift by God's grace" in verse 24 is a restatement and explanation of what he meant in verse

22 by "the righteousness of God through faith." So we have God's act of justifying sinners in verse 20 and

again in verse 24 and in between we have two references to God's manifesting his righteousness through

faith (verses 20, 22).

So I take Paul to be saying this: In the death of Jesus (verses 24-25), God has manifested his own

righteousness by imputing or crediting that righteousness to sinners and pronouncing them righteous or

just with his own righteousness. This is called justification. This idea of manifesting his righteousness now

apart from the law (verses 21-22) is so close to the revealing of the righteousness of God in 1:17, that I

think they are the same.

This is my second reason for saying that Romans 1:17 refers to the righteousness of God given to man in

the act of justification - the act of declaring sinners righteous through faith in Jesus.

Not Pressing Artificial Separations

But I don't want to press artificial separations here between these ways of looking at God's righteousness.

The gospel does reveal that God demonstrates his attribute of righteousness in justifying sinners who

trust Jesus (Romans 3:25-26); that's why Jesus had to die - to show that sin was dealt with righteously, to

show that God was "both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (3:26).

And the gospel does reveal that the death of Jesus purchased not only a declaration of our right standing

before God, but also a development of our right living before God. Romans 8:3-4 says, "Sending His own

Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, [God] condemned sin in the flesh" [that's what happened at

the cross: sin was punished, executed. Now here is the purpose that the cross enables:] (4) so that the

[just] requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according

to the Spirit." Because our sins have once for all been condemned in the death of Christ, we now have

new power and freedom to make real progress in fulfilling the moral law of God by the power of his Spirit.

"He breaks the power of cancelled sin," as Charles Wesley wrote ("O For a Thousand Tongues").

The Gospel Reveals to Us God's Work for Us

But for all that, which we will see fully in the weeks to come, don't miss the glory of the main point in verse

17. How does the gospel save believers? How does it save you? The gospel is the power of God to save

everyone who believes (Romans 1:16), because in it is being revealed for our encouragement and for our

endurance in faith the precious truth that God gives to us what he demands from us, namely, his own

righteousness. And he does this mainly in the sense that he declares believers to be righteous with his

own righteousness. He counts us as righteous with a perfect righteousness, namely, his own. He forgives

us, acquits us, justifies us by our faith.

This is how the gospel saves us. It reveals these things for us to see and believe.

What we need day in and day out, in order to make our way to heaven, is to see and receive and feed on

this gift of imputed righteousness. This is the way God saves believers. This can be and should be

grasped by children. Let me try to say it simply. We all do bad things and we all are bad in the sense that

the bad we do comes from a deeply rooted badness. Our bad deeds come from a bad heart. But God

says that we should be good or he cannot accept us, because his own goodness would be ruined by our

badness. So what we need is for God to take our badness and punish it in the death of Jesus, and then

take the goodness of Jesus - his own goodness - and make it ours.

That's what he did. So everyone who believes in Jesus receives the gift of God's goodness, God's

righteousness. That is called justification by faith.

Feed on the Gospel Daily

Look to it daily in the gospel. Be relieved by it daily from the gospel. Be encouraged by it daily from the

gospel. Be emboldened by it daily. Be empowered daily. You live by an alien righteousness. Not by your

performances, but by God's. This is the gospel we live by and this is the gospel we will share this week

with family and friends. And this is the gospel that will save us and bring us safely home to God.

How Does the Gospel Save Believers? Part 3 CLICK HERE FOR MP3

By John Piper August 23, 1998

Romans 1:16-17

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to

the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is

written, "But the righteous man shall live by faith."

Two Ultimate Concerns in Life

There are only two ultimate concerns in life. One is how to display God in our lives. The other is how to be

happy in God forever. These are the great concerns in the world for every person and every people

group, whether we are conscious of it or not. How shall a person think and feel and act so as to show the

glory of God? And what must we think and feel and do so as to be fully happy in God for all eternity? And

not just us, but all the peoples.

Romans 1:16-17 deals with these great concerns - as does the whole book. Verse 16 is about God's

power to save us. That deals with concern number two: our longing to be happy in God forever. "I am not

ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first

and also to the Greek." The power of God for salvation - that means, at least, the power of God to make

us happy in him forever. Romans 14:17 says, "The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but

righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." That is what salvation includes. So the gospel is the

power of God to bring believers into the eternal experience of "righteousness, peace and joy."

Verse 17 is about the revelation of the righteousness of God in the gospel. So this verse deals with our

first great concern: how to display God in our lives. Verse 17 explains how the gospel - the good news

about the death and resurrection of Jesus - saves believers. The gospel is the power of God to give

believers eternal joy, it says, "For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is

written, 'But the righteous man shall live by faith.'" What stands out here is that the gospel has power to

save us because it reveals something of God. And that's what the first great concern in the universe is:

the revealing or showing of God.

So verse 16 deals with the great concern of our eternal joy (called "salvation") and verse 17 deals with the

issue of the manifestation of God (in particular his righteousness). Things don't get any bigger. They don't

get any more important than this. If you think you have bigger issues in your life than this, you are not

seeing reality. If you think the Clinton scandals are bigger or the missile reprisals are bigger, you need to

turn off the TV and think for a moment. Henry VIII made Bill Clinton look like a Puritan, and he is dead -

barely a blip on the screen of history (died 1547), where Bill Clinton will be very soon. And the terrorism of

Genghis Khan, wiping out whole peoples, makes today's terrorist assaults seem like recess squabbles;

but he is gone, and who even knows what century he lived in (AD 1162-1227)?

What seems great and all-important now may, in fact, be very small. But whether God is shown and

known, and whether you will have eternal joy - these are truly great and ultimate concerns. So I am

praying earnestly that God will open your eyes and give you a passion for the gospel which is the power

of God to save believers, and for the revealing of God's righteousness which is the way the gospel brings

believers to eternal life and joy.

"We Shall Be Saved from the Wrath of God"

This is our sixth message on these two verses. And the main point I have been making is that these

verses are not mainly about how people become believers, but about how believers are saved - how we

escape the wrath of God at the end of the age and enter into eternal life and joy. Verse 16 says that the

gospel is the power of God to save believers. And verse 17 says that the way it works is that in the gospel

the righteousness of God is being revealed. Both the believing in verse 16 and the revealing in verse 17

are present tense continuous action verbs (in Greek). "The gospel is the power of God for salvation to

everyone who continues to believe, because in that gospel the righteousness of God continues to be

revealed."

From our side the key to our being saved from the wrath to come is to go on believing and trusting God.

The key, from God's side, to our being saved is that he goes on revealing to us the righteousness of God

in the gospel, month after month and year after year.

The issue in these verses is how God saves believers from his final judgment and brings them safely into

everlasting righteousness and peace and joy. Romans 13:11 says, "Salvation is nearer to us now than

when we [first] believed." Full and final salvation is future. Romans 5:9 says, "Having now been justified

by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him." That is what is at stake in these

verses. How does God bring a believer through life so that in the end he is saved from wrath and has

eternal life and joy?

In fact, Romans 5:9 is an exact restatement of Romans 1:16-17 with the order of thought reversed. Let's

reverse the order of the two halves of Romans 5:9 so they match the order of Romans 1:16-17. Instead of

"[a] Having now been justified by His blood, [b] we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him,"

turn it around and let it say, "[b] We shall be saved from the wrath of God through Christ, [a] because we

have been justified by his blood." That is exactly the structure of Romans 1:16-17.

Justification Is the Foundation of Glorification

The gospel is the power of God unto salvation because in it the righteousness of God is revealed, that is,

God reveals righteousness as a free gift that we need and don't have. That, we have seen, is the

meaning of verses 16 and 17: our final salvation (verse 16) is based on God's giving the righteousness to

us that he demands from us (verse 17). The way Paul says it in Romans 8:30 is: "Those whom He

justified, He also glorified." Justification (God's righteousness completely imputed to us) is the foundation

of glorification (God's righteousness completely imparted to us).

Or to see the same order of salvation in different language, look at Romans 8:32: "He who did not spare

His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" In

other words, the foundation for all our future hope of life and joy and salvation is based on God's giving

his Son to die as a substitute for us so that our sins could be on him, and his righteousness could be on

us. It's the same pattern of salvation in Romans 8:30,32 and Romans 5:9 and Romans 1:16-17. This is

the great theme and structure of this book.

Our Hope for Salvation

All our hope for salvation (verse 16) hangs on beholding and believing the revelation of God's

righteousness as a gift to us (verse 17). The book of Romans is going to demand many things of us as

believers, but we are not to do any of them in order to take away our guilt or forgive our sin or get for us

the gift of righteousness. God accomplished that once for all in the death of Jesus in our place; and he

gave it to us freely through faith the very moment we truly believed. This is why justification is treated as a

past event in our lives and is the foundation and security of everything else: "Having now been justified by

His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God" (5:9). The past grace of justification secures the

future grace of salvation.

The power that will bring believers to that salvation is the revelation of that justification. That's the

meaning of the connection between Romans 1:16 and 17. To fulfill all that is required of us to enter

heaven, we must see it over and over again - the ongoing revelation in the gospel that the righteousness

of God is given to us freely through faith. If we don't know ourselves acquitted and forgiven and counted

righteous now, we will not be able to walk the path that leads to life. Either we will despair and turn to

worldliness; or we will try to earn our way into God's favor with moral and religious performances.

Everything God requires of us as believers assumes that we are justified -accepted, forgiven, acquitted,

counted righteous with his righteousness, not ours. From that secure position we must fight sin and

unbelief. And the one who fights like that - as a justified sinner - will live.

"The Righteous Man Shall Live by Faith"

Now that is exactly what I think the last half of verse 17 means. Let's look at this quote from Habakkuk

2:4. "In the gospel the righteousness of God is being revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, "But the

righteous man shall live by faith." In the context of the book of Habakkuk the meaning of this sentence is

just what it is here. The unrighteous nations are in great peril before the judgment of God. For example,

Habakkuk 1:5-6:

Be astonished! Wonder! Because I am doing something in your days - You would not believe if you were

told. For behold, I am raising up the Chaldeans [Babylon], that fierce and impetuous people who march

throughout the earth to seize dwelling places which are not theirs.

But Judah herself is not exempt from judgment. The wickedness and idolatry of some is about to be tried

in the wrath of the Babylonian invasion. The crucial question here is: How can a person be saved? How

can they gain their lives and not be destroyed in God's judgment? That's the same question addressed by

Romans 1:16 - who will be saved from the wrath of God?

Two Crucial Truths

The answer of the book of Habakkuk is given in 2:4: "Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right

within him; but the righteous will live by his faith." There are two crucial truths in this verse that are

relevant for Paul's argument.

1. Rescue depends on faith.

One is that rescue from the judgment of God depends on faith. That's what Habakkuk 2:4 promises: "the

righteous will live by his faith." That is, it's by faith that you gain your life. By faith you will not be swept

away utterly in the wrath of God. By faith you will live. So "living" in Habakkuk 2:4 and here in Romans

1:17b ("the righteous will live") refers to salvation from the judgment of God. And that is tremendously

important for Paul's point in verse 16. There he says, "salvation [is] to everyone who believes." Rescue

from God's wrath and the gift of eternal life is given freely to those who trust God. Then he sees this same

truth in Habakkuk 2:4 and quotes it to give further support to that part of his point. The words, "will live by

faith" in verse 17b correspond to "salvation to everyone who believes" in verse 16. We are saved from

judgment and inherit life by trusting God. (See Habakkuk 2:18 and 3:16,18-19 for what the "faith" of 2:4

looks like. And see Habakkuk 3:13 for the word "salvation" as reference to the promise of life.)

That's one truth in Habakkuk 2:4 that is relevant for Paul's argument.

2. Life is gained by faith.

The other is that it is a righteous person who gains his life by faith. "The righteous shall live [the righteous

person shall gain his life and be saved from God's wrath] by faith." Now that is crucial for what Paul is

saying about the righteousness of God. Habakkuk 2:4 doesn't say in so many words that we get God's

righteousness by faith, which is what Paul teaches in this book and in Romans 1:17. But Habakkuk does

link the righteous person and faith. The least we can say - and maybe we should say more - is that the

thing about righteous people that brings them to life and salvation is their faith. It is a very small step then

to say: Well then, faith is the essential thing about being righteous before God.

In fact, if it is by faith that we escape God's judgment, and if, as Habakkuk 1:13 says, "[God, your] eyes

are too pure to approve evil, and You cannot look on wickedness with favor," then faith must somehow be

counted by God as righteousness, because otherwise we could never be rescued by him and given life by

him, because we are all sinners and he could never look on us with favor. So, if God can't look on any evil

with approval (Habakkuk 1:13) and yet saves us and gives us life by our faith (Habakkuk 2:4), then our

righteousness that has a standing with this holy God must be a righteousness by faith and a gift from him.

And that is the other reason this text is so crucial for Paul's argument.

So in summary, we see two things in Romans 1:16-17 that are confirmed in the Old Testament quote. 1)

One (verse 16) is that the gospel is the power of God to save believers. If we have faith in him we will live

and not perish. 2) The other is that the way God saves believers is by revealing (in that gospel) the

righteousness of God as a gift "from faith to faith." The righteousness he demands from us (Habakkuk

1:13) he freely gives to us. This is what God reveals "from faith to faith."

"From Faith to Faith"

So the last thing I want to ask in these verses is, What does "from faith to faith" mean in verse 17? There

are two or three keys to this.

1) The only real parallel to this phrase in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 2:15-16. (But see also

Psalm 84:7 and Jeremiah 9:3.) Paul says, "We are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are

being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other

an aroma from life to life." "From death to death," and "from life to life" are identical in wording to "from

faith to faith." The most natural interpretation seems to be: when Paul's message and sufferings meet with

death in the soul, that leads to the final death of the soul. And when his message and sufferings meet

with spiritual life, that leads to final life. Death is unresponsive to the gospel and is confirmed in its

deadness forever. Spiritual life is responsive to the gospel and is confirmed and preserved for eternal life.

So here in Romans 1:17 it says, "The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith." That is, when

the revelation of the gift of righteousness meets with faith it leads to future faith. Faith is the initial window

of the soul that lets the light of the revelation of righteousness in. And when the light of God's gift of

righteousness comes in by faith, it powerfully works to awaken and sustain and engender more and more

faith for the years to come.

2) The other key to understanding "from faith to faith" is to see how well this meaning meets the demands

of verse 16. Verse 16 says that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who go on believing -

present tense continuous action. So we must go on believing. In 1 Corinthians 15:1-2, Paul says, "Now I

make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also

you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you

believed in vain." So if we give up on our faith and throw it away, our supposed faith will prove to have

been vain, empty, dead.

The Gospel Keeps Believers Believing

What saves is persevering faith (Mark 13:13; Colossians 1:23). If that's true, now it makes clear sense

why verse 17 explains how God saves believers by saying that in the gospel God reveals a righteousness

for us that is first perceived and embraced by faith, and then has the effect of awakening all the

necessary future faith that we need in order to be saved. The gospel saves believers because the gospel

keeps believers believing. (See 1 Peter 1:5.)

In Romans 8:13 Paul says, "If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to

death the deeds of the body, you will live." But the problem is, we all know that in our war with sin we do

not win often enough to have peace in our consciences. So if our life hangs on perfect winning in the war

with sin, we are going to despair and not persevere to the end. We will simply give up, because there is

no use trying.

What then will keep us going and fighting so that we will live? Romans 1:16,17 answers: the gospel is the

power of God to save believers because in the gospel we can see revealed every day that our standing

with God is not based on our own righteousness but on God's, freely given to us by faith. And when we

see that over and over in the gospel, day after day, as long as we live, our faith is renewed and sustained,

and we press on in the fight. Our confidence that God will help us in life and save us from the wrath to

come is based on our ever-renewed assurance that our acceptance with him is based on the gift of his

own righteousness, not ours.

So every time the Bible demands you to do something do not think, "I must do this to take away my guilt

or to get forgiveness or to get a right standing with God." Rather think, "I will do this because my guilt is

already removed, I am already forgiven, I already have the gift of God's righteousness, and so I know that

God is for me and will help me. So I will trust him and obey him and display by my radical, risk-taking

obedience the glory of God's grace. And I will draw nearer and nearer to him in the fellowship of his

sufferings and the joy of his companionship.