Romans 3:27

27. Boasting The Jew need no longer be solicitous about his advantage, (Romans 3:1,) nor his being better, (Romans 3:9.) The law of salvation by faith is a complete leveller of men in comparison with each other, and of men as claiming to earn or merit justification from God.

Of works? By WORKS is meant not merely the ritual performances of the Mosaic law, (though these are included,) but every action of body or mind by which we assume to justly earn salvation, or claim to compensate or PAY God for kindnesses done by him to us. That grace or salvation cannot be bestowed by God for works in such a sense is plain, for,

1. God does not need us, and can do entirely without us. He can drop us any moment into non-existence without any real loss to himself. Nay, the angel who has lived trillions of years in perfect obedience to God has no claim for another moment of existence.

2 . Far less can any works of man be any equivalent for the eternal weight of glory prepared for the elect of God. Be it that our works are excellent, how high must the excellence be in order to be an equivalent for endless blessedness? If wherever we find the word works in the epistle we read it adequate compensation, we shall at once see the conclusiveness of the apostle’s reasoning. (See note on Romans 4:4.)

3 . And especially that our works of the law are no purchase of God’s favour is clear; for since all find themselves transgressors, so on the ground of pure law, as the apostle conclusively maintains, can no flesh be justified. (See notes on Romans 14:2; Romans 10:4.) The only way for man as a sinner is to fall back from the platform of law upon the platform of grace and mercy.

4 . Grace in salvation does not, as predestinarians do vainly think, imply that faith is omnipotently or sovereignly planted in a man, (see note on Romans 3:24;) but in the fact that the conditions of salvation are not compensative works, but faith. And faith being a complete self-surrender to God, by him to be ruled and saved, does of itself confess that all salvation comes by grace, and not by works, wages, pay, or compensation to God. Thus faith is the non-meritorious condition of salvation.

5 . And yet, after all, under the gospel system works are meritorious! We are required to work; to work out our salvation. We are rewarded according to our works. (See note on Romans 2:6.) And St. James tells us most truly that we are justified by works. For, after the soul has by faith submitted itself to God, God does accept it and its imperfect works, which then, indeed, are acts of faith. Even in the unregenerate state, right doings are intrinsically excellent. (Note on Matthew 5:7.) They are better than wrong doings. And in the man of faith God accepts them as done to and for him; conferring on them a higher excellency than belongs to them even a rewardable merit.

6 . The battle of the apostle against works in this epistle is part of his great battle against circumcision as a means of salvation, against the claim of the power of the Jewish Ritual to save without Christ, and against the proud pretences of heathen moralism. It is, indeed, the great battle of the gospel against all Antichristianity. When Christianity itself becomes overloaded with a pile of rituals and performances, prescribed as works for salvation, the whole is overthrown by appealing to the doctrine of justification by simple heart-deep faith without the works of the law. To this Luther appealed against the ritualism of the Church of Rome; to this Wesley appealed against the formalism of the Church of England.