Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

it. No intelligent physician ever administers medicine till he diagnoses the patient and becomes
acquainted with the disease. If the preachers would begin, like Paul, on the sin-side and go down to
the bottom, revealing the hidden things of darkness, holding the big church officers and the
influential women out over an open hell day after day, they would raise a row just as Paul did.
Sanctification thirty years ago made me a red-hot preacher of the Sinai Gospel. I have been pelted
with rocks, dirt, eggs, potatoes, apples, run off frequently, hauled away, and threatened with
immediate death. Why is it not so now with you? I am no longer physically equal to the evangelistic
work. God is now using me as a teacher, helping the saints into better experiences and a more
thorough understanding of the precious Word. If I were young again, I certainly, like Paul, would
preach the Sinai Gospel more courageously than ever. Beginning with verse 19, Paul evolves the
longest argument in the Bible confirmatory of justification by the free grace of God in Christ,
received and appropriated by faith alone without deeds of law. This wonderful and unanswerable
argument runs through the remainder of chapter 3 and all of chapters 4 and 5, winding up with that
grand a fortiori argument on the “much-mores.”
20. “Therefore by deeds of law shall no flesh be justified in his presence.” In vain have legalists
labored to so interpret this plain passage, which occurs so frequently in the Pauline writings, as to
make it exclude the New Testament ritual. It is so plain and positive as to be utterly inevasible in the
positive exclusion of all deeds of all law. It simply kills the legalistic heresy outright and forever,
sweeping from the field the remotest possibility of human works having anything to do with
justification. “For through law is the perfect knowledge of sin.” The law is simply the light which
reveals sin. The room may be much polluted with dirt, and the inmates think it is clean till the light
is brought in, which reveals all of the filth, but has no power to remove it and cleanse the room. This
is precisely what the law does. It reveals sin, but has no power to take it away.
21. “But now the righteousness of God is made manifest without law, being witnessed by the law
and the prophets.” This righteousness of God is utterly independent of all law, because God Himself
is the law-giver. “Law” in this passage is without the article, showing that it excludes all law
indiscriminately, while in the statement, “the law and the prophets,” having reference to the Mosaic
law, we have the article. What is the righteousness of God? It is the righteousness (or justification,
as they are synonymous) of God in Christ, i.e., the righteousness which Christ procured for us by His
vicarious death. Our Savior has a righteousness peculiar to His divinity, and essential to it, which
He will never give to another, but retain forever. He so has a righteousness peculiar to His humanity,
and essential to it, which He will retain forever, and never give to another. Yet He has a third
righteousness arising from His perfect obedience to the divine law, both keeping it actively and
passively paying its penalty for us. This third righteousness, which is neither essential to His Godhead
nor His manhood, He procured not for Himself, as He did not need it, but for you and me. This
righteousness is the only palladium that can possibly fortify us against the terrors of the violated law,
and it is God’s glorious and munificent gift in Christ. Since it is a free gift, we do not have to give
anything for it. The abandonment of all sin is indispensable to put us in position to receive it by
simple faith, i.e., faith is the hand by which the soul receives it, i.e., the only spiritual faculty
competent to receive it. Hence, if we do not receive it by faith alone, we will never get it, and hell
is our doom.