The Ring, Not the Gavel--October 28, 2026

The Ring, Not the Gavel--October 28, 2026

"But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe." (Romans 3:21-22a)

What if God's kind of "justice" sounds less like the banging of a judge's gavel that directs the bailiff to throw you in jail, and more like someone's wedding vow promising you, "All that I have is yours, and you are mine..."?

I'm tossing this question out because I think that's actually what the apostle Paul is trying to say to us in these verses from his letter to the Romans, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday as a part of Reformation celebrations.  The thrust of Paul's argument here is that we have all grossly misunderstood what terms like "righteousness" and "justice" mean, and then we've projected them onto heaven to make God seem like a trigger-happy tyrant in the sky looking for reasons to zap us, when God is really more like the love of your life promising faithfulness to you forever.  If that sounds unbecoming and unfitting for a respectable deity, maybe we need to revise our picture of God.  Maybe, in fact, we have unwittingly switched out the Scriptures' portrait of the living God with a carbon copy of the lightning-bolt-wielding Zeus or some other vengeful divine notion.

And maybe the problem for us begins with the words.  In our ears, "righteousness" so often smacks of cold, antiseptic, tedious rule-following, like a line judge on a tennis court making judgments about what is in or out of bounds, or an health inspector with a white glove checking for unseen dirty and unswept cobwebs in our souls.  The word Paul uses here is the same word you would use in ancient Greek for "justice," too, which equally conjures up its own set of images--largely courtroom scenes where the guilty are sent away to their punishments and where verdicts are declared based on cold hard facts.  What did all those years of Law and Order episodes ingrain in us, but that justice has to do either with the police who catch criminals or the prosecutors who put them on trial?  Could it be that Paul has something different in mind?

Spoiler alert: yes.  Yes, Paul's whole point here is that if we have gotten hung up on picturing God as some emotionless cosmic judge smiting sinners or writing up citations for spiritual health-code violations, we have been missing the point.  After pointing out (as we looked at in yesterday's devotion) that none of us can rack up a perfect score or avoid any bad marks on our permanent record, not even the religious "insiders" who had access to the Law of Moses for centuries, today Paul says that "apart from the law," God's kind of justice has been seen through Christ.  And ultimately God's kind of justice (or "righteousness"--same word in Greek, remember) isn't about zapping sinners for their sins or spiritual bean-counting at all.  It's about Christ giving us his own "righteousness" for ourselves.  It's about Jesus saying, "You can count all my goodness as yours, because I'm giving it to you." It's about the living God promising--as in a marriage vow--"All I have is yours, and you are mine."  God's justice is less about meting out punishments and more about mending our broken relationship with God.

As it turns out, this is precisely the insight that our older brother in the faith Martin Luther picked up and ran with in the 16th century after some intensive reading of Paul's letters (especially Romans, in fact).  Luther rediscovered that when Paul talks about the "righteousness/justice of God," he doesn't have in mind a divine umpire calling balls and strikes or a celestial judge condemning sinners to hell, but a young couple pledging their lives to each other in marriage and saying, in effect, "All that is mine is yours and all that is yours is mine."  Righteousness is about God in Christ giving to us all of Christ's own goodness, much like you receive all of your spouse's belongings into your household when you get married, and your spouse receives all of yours.  As we talk about marriage taking two flesh and making them one, we are united to Christ, so all that is his becomes ours and we become his.  That's how God mends and restores the relationships we have broken from our side in sin--not by throwing lightning bolts but by making promises, not by banging a gavel but by giving us a ring, so to speak.

If we've had the wrong picture in our minds all along, today is a day to get the right one put in its place. Today is the day to hear all the Bible's talk of "the righteousness of God" not as something to make us afraid, but as something to give us hope.  All we can do is trust that what God promises, God will do. 

The knee is bent. The ring is out.  The vow is made.  You are beloved.

Lord Jesus, thank you for giving us all that you have and all that you are, and for taking all that is ours into yourself.  Make us righteous and just as you are righteous and just, by indwelling us with your own presence.