Romans 3:27,28 - Who's boasting now?

3:27

Paul now returns to the Jew, or possibly also the moral Gentile. The Jew was proud of his Jewish heritage, a moral person may be proud of their “goodness”, but in the gospel there is no room for boasting. On our own merits what have any of us got to boast about? All we can offer God is a catalogue of sins and a deeply corrupted nature. The “law that requires works” itself testifies against us. So instead we rely on the “law” that requires faith.

3:28

“We maintain that a person is justified by faith, apart from the law”. Implicit in all this is that a person needs to be justified, we need somehow to be shown to be in the right. Men try many ways in order to achieve this. The religious way is to try and achieve this by works, by good moral behaviour or by following religious rituals, or a mixture of the two. Others try to achieve it by proving their own wisdom, their own cleverness. Even the atheist who rails against God is trying to prove that he is right to reject the existence of God. All these attempts fail because of the fundamental fact that we are a fallen race, and the empirical evidence to support this claim is vast. Just turn on the news, look at your workplace, look at yourself! The gospel answer is that we are justified by faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and obeying the law has nothing to do with it. Now, we need to be careful here. In discarding the law here Paul is discarding it as a mean of justifying ourselves, he is most definitely not discarding its moral standards. He is countering those who argued that Gentile Christians needed to observe the Law, in particular circumcision.