In his book Right With God Right Now, Desmond Ford argues that atonement was completed on the cross and that there is no need of subsequent actions in the heavenly sanctuary for salvation to be fully experienced by the believer. On the basis of Romans 3:21–26, he emphasizes that God could not have forgiven sin until its penalty was paid, and so the Cross was necessary to entitle God to forgive. Not that God is controlled bya law outside of Himself, Ford argues.He is not. God is controlled by whatHe is, meaning that His law is but the outward expression of His own character. The Cross, therefore, was necessary, Ford concludes, and on it the One sinned against paid the penalty so that the sinner could be forgiven and saved.1
Despite the several difficulties Romans 3:21–26 entails, Ford’s interpretation of this passage presents no major problem, but is it possible to conclude from these verses that the Cross is where atonement was completed and is all that God needs? Is Jesus’ ministry in the heavenly sanctuary, as postulated by Seventh-day Adventist theology, a contradiction of His accomplishments on Calvary? Or does it really detract from the believer’s full assurance of salvation here and now?2
Preliminary considerations
Because of the way Romans 3:21–26 summarizes Paul’s concept of justification, these verses have been described as the heart and center of Romans.3 The passage comes right after a long section in which the apostle makes it unmistakably clear that all humanity, whether Jew or Gentile, is caught up in sinfulness and so is held accountable to God (1:18–3:20). But then comes the good news: God’s saving righteousness has been dramatically revealed in the atoning death of Jesus Christ as the only possible answer to the human plight created by sin (vv. 21–26). Such answer, however, is effective only for those who believe (see v. 22). Faith is not the condition for justification but rather the instrument through which the sinner receives justification.4 All boasting, therefore, is excluded (v. 27). Faith establishes the inability—not the nullity—of the law (v. 31), and so of human self-confidence in any kind of moral attainment (vv. 28, 29).
When talking about Jesus’ death—“His blood” (v. 25) being a clear reference to it—Paul uses two metaphors to explain on what grounds God justifies the sinner. The implied objection seems obvious: How can a righteous God justify the unrighteous without compromising His righteousness? The answer comes first under the metaphor of redemption (apolytrōsis) (v. 24b), which was applied to slaves who were purchased in the marketplace in order to be set free. When this happened, they were said to have been redeemed (see Lev. 25:47–55). The same metaphor is also used in the Old Testament (OT) of the people of Israel who were redeemed from both Egyptian and Babylonian captivity (Deut. 7:8; Isa. 43:1). Just so, those who were enslaved by sin and completely unable to liberate themselves have been redeemed by God, or bought out of captivity, through the blood of Jesus that was shed as a ransom price (cf. Mark 10:45; 1 Pet. 1:18, 19; Rev. 5:9).
The second metaphor is propitiation or atonement (hilastērion) (Rom. 3:25), taken from the context of worship—more precisely, sacrifice. Propitiation or atonement points to the substitutionary character of Jesus’ death in the sense that He voluntarily experienced on the cross the whole intensity of God’s wrath against sin (1:18; 5:9; 1 Thess. 1:10),5 thus effecting reconciliation between the sinner and God. Death is the penalty for sin (Rom. 6:23; cf. Ezek. 18:20), but just as the sacrificial animal in the OT times took the place of the sinner and died in his or her stead (Lev. 17:10, 11; cf. Gen. 22:13), so Jesus’ death was the perfect, antitypical sacrifice that releases those who believe from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:10, 11, 13; cf. 2 Cor. 5:14, 15; Heb. 2:9) and reconciles them with God. There were several sacrifices in Israel’s religious life, and all of them met their fulfillment in the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ (Heb. 9:12, 26–28; 10:12), “ ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ ” (John 1:29 NKJV; cf. Isa. 53:5, 6).
God’s righteousness
Perhaps the most controversial issue in our passage is whether God’s righteousness, or “His righteousness,” in verses 25 and 26 (NKJV) has the same meaning as in verses 21 and 22. The traditional interpretation, which seems to fit the context better, is that dikaiosynē autou in those verses refers to an attribute of God, meaning that God is righteous, while in verses 21 and 22 it must be taken as a gift from God, the righteousness that He imputes to those who believe.6 If so, verses 25 and 26 differ from verses 21 and 22 in the sense that Paul is no longer talking about what God has done to justify the sinner but about what He has done to justify, or vindicate, Himself. In other words, what Paul does here is present a rational argument for the necessity of Jesus’ death. This describes why he uses the forensic term endeixis (“proof/demonstration”) twice in this context (vv. 25, 26), whereas in verse 21 he uses the passive form of the verb phaneroō (“to reveal/make known”). These two terms are not equivalent. While phaneroō puts the emphasis on that which is revealed, that is, on the subject of the verb itself, hence the passive voice—exactly as with apokalyptō in 1:17—endeixis always points to something else (cf. 2 Cor. 8:24), trying to establish its validity or compelling its acceptance as truth.7
The idea, therefore, emphasizes that God set forth Jesus Christ as a hilastērion “at the present time” (v. 26a), the time of Jesus’ historical death, in order to prove His righteousness because, in His “forbearance” (anochē), He “had passed over” (paresis) the sins that had been previously committed (v. 25, NKJV).8 For Paul, by doing this God created a legal problem for Himself, for a righteous God cannot simply “clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:7; cf. Deut. 25:1). If He does so, He can be accused of conniving with evil, which is a denial of His own nature.9 But how exactly did God pass over former sins? According to the traditional interpretation, which goes back to Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century, God passed over sins by not punishing them.10 But there seems to be a problem here, for how does the Cross prove God’s righteousness in relation to the sins committed beforehand and not punished? Unless Paul is referring to those who had been justified, the argument makes no sense. We just have to remember that (1) sins are not punished today more than they were before; (2) all the sinners of the OT times sooner or later ceased to exist, so in a sense it could be said that they had indeed been punished; and (3) in the OT times, God did not always let sins go unpunished, as Paul himself says (Rom. 1:24–32; cf. 5:12–14; 6:23; 7:13; 1 Cor. 10:5, 8, 10).
The apostle, therefore, seems to have in mind those repentant sinners who had been justified by God prior to the Cross. Evidence for this, besides endeixis, is the connection of God’s righteousness with His right to justify in verse 26. The idea, then, is not simply that God withheld punishment of sins when He should have inflicted it but that He “passed over” such sins by justifying, without legal backing so to speak (cf. Heb. 10:4), those who committed them.11 This was the case, for example, of Abraham and David (see Rom. 4:1-8). By forgiving sins in a time when the propitiatory blood had not yet been shed (see Heb. 9:15), God put His own character at stake, raising serious questions about His presumed righteousness (Ps. 9:8; Isa. 5:16).
Thus, if God’s intention by presenting Jesus Christ as a hilastērion was to demonstrate His righteousness, so that “at the present time” He can be both “just and the justifier” of those who believe in Jesus (Rom. 3:26b), this seems to imply that in former times He was only one of those two things—only the justifier, suggesting that He was not just when He acted as such. The notion of God not acting justly, or righteously, seems blasphemous, but this is the meaning of Paul’s words in this passage. He uses forensic language to describe the implications of the way God dealt with sins in the past and, by extension, in the present as well, for there is no question that sin is a human problem, but once forgiven, it becomes a divine problem. God is the One who has to account for it, as perhaps there is nothing more contradictory to His holiness and righteousness than His act of justifying the ungodly (4:5). But the Bible makes it clear that God is also love, and the tension between love and righteousness has been solved by the Cross (5:6–11).
The cross and the sanctuary
One thing is clear in Romans 3:21–26: the cross gives God the right to forgive and justify. The cross is all that God needs to implement salvation. At the cross, all OT sacrifices met their fulfillment, including the one that was offered on the Day of Atonement. Why, then, do we need a doctrine of the heavenly sanctuary as claimed by Seventh-day Adventists?
The Greek word hilastērion is also used in the New Testament (NT) for the golden lid that was placed on top of the ark of the testimony in the Most Holy Place of the Israelite sanctuary (Heb. 9:5; cf. Exod. 25:17–22, LXX); the ark was the supreme symbol of God’s presence among His people. Usually called the “mercy seat,” that lid, which was overshadowed by the wings of two cherubim, was in fact the place where the second of the two-phase propitiation—or atonement—ritual took place.12 In phase one, the sins were forgiven and then transferred to the sanctuary (Lev. 4:3–7, 13–18, 22–25, 27–30). In phase two, which occurred once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the sanctuary was cleansed of such sins (16:15–19). In fact, the Day of Atonement was not about forgiveness; the term does not even occur in Leviticus 16 or 23:27–32. The Day of Atonement was the time when the sanctuary (and the people) was cleansed and the sins finally and definitively blotted out (see 16:29–34; 23:27–32).
Forgiveness and blotting out of sins, therefore, are not the same thing. Forgiveness, which was real and effective, was achieved through regular sacrifices (Lev. 17:10, 11), when the sins were transferred to the sanctuary, that is, to God Himself. “God assumes the guilt of sinners in order to declare them righteous. If God forgives sinners, He takes their blame.”13 Next, the sins needed to be blotted out, and this was accomplished on the Day of Atonement. Two things, then, must be vindicated: God’s right to forgive and the sinner’s aptness to be forgiven, which is nothing but his or her faithful acceptance of God’s forgiveness. In other words, forgiveness has two sides, the side of the One who provides forgiveness and that of the one who receives forgiveness. Where salvation is concerned, both sides must be well justified: the side of God, otherwise He could be charged of arbitrariness; and the human side, otherwise the result would be universalism, which is the idea that all humanity will eventually be saved. If salvation is by faith, it needs to be accepted. So, just as the sacrifice justifies God’s prerogative to forgive (Rom. 3:25, 26), some sort of examination is necessary in order to demonstrate that forgiveness has been truly and faithfully accepted. Only when both sides of forgiveness are clearly and fully vindicated can the blame—the legal responsibility—be finally taken away from God Himself.
This is why we need both the cross and the sanctuary, the sacrifice and the actual Day of Atonement. On that day (the most important day of Israel’s religious calendar as it marked the final cleansing of both the people and the sanctuary), all the people were required to cease their work and humble their souls in complete submission to God (Lev. 23:27). Those who did not follow these instructions, which imply some form of scrutiny, were to be cut off and destroyed, even if they had been forgiven before (vv. 29, 30). On the cross, God Himself bore the sinner’s punishment (1 Cor. 15:3; 2 Cor. 5:14, 15; 1 Pet. 2:24; 3:18). He paid the ransom price and shed the propitiatory blood for our salvation. This is the reason Jesus had to die if we were to be saved. And in the sanctuary, human commitment to God is verified, so as to demonstrate that He was right in forgiving this or that person. The cross in no way can prove that God is just when He justifies an individual sinner—the human end of forgiveness. The cross entitles God to forgive. As a sacrifice of atonement, the cross was perfect and complete, but it alone cannot vindicate our commitment to Jesus Christ as our Savior. There is need for something else—to bring atonement to its final stage—and that is where the sanctuary comes in.
The sanctuary, then, is not about works, as forgiveness is not about works. Paul himself is absolutely clear on this in Romans 8:31–39. When accused of ineligibility for salvation because of their sins, those who have put their trust in Jesus can rest on the assurance that He is mediating for them before God. They have nothing to fear, as nothing will be able to separate them “from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v. 39, NKJV; cf. 1 John 1:9). Salvation is not once for all, but apart from us (ourselves), there is nothing in the entire world that can take us away from God’s salvation (cf. John 6:37). “Let us draw near,” then, “with a true heart in full assurance of faith. . . . Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:22, 23, NKJV). This is the message of the sanctuary.
1 Desmond Ford, Right With God Right Now: How God Saves People as Shown in the Bible’s Book of Romans (Newcastle: Desmond Ford, 1999), 43–55 (esp. 44, 47, 54, 55). At one point in his discussion, Ford is also reacting against the so-called moral influence theory, according to which the cross was not really necessary, that Jesus’ death was but a gesture on God’s part to show He loves us, which means He could have forgiven sin without the cross (44–48). Ford’s main contention, however, is that “the ancient Day of Atonement is not talking about the nineteenth century. It points to the cross of Christ. That’s where the final, full atonement was made. Calvary was the only place of complete atonement. We look only to Calvary, not to an event or date invented by man” (55). On the moral influence theory, see John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 217–226.
2 This essay follows the traditional Reformed interpretation of Paul’s doctrine of justification, particularly with respect to issues such as “works of the law” (Rom. 3:20; cf. Gal. 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10), which refers to the concept that God’s favor can be earned by good works and obedience to all the prescriptions of the law, and pistis Christou (Rom. 3:22, 26; cf. Gal. 2:16, 20; 3:22; Phil. 3:9), which is understood as “faith in Christ,” rather than “the faith [fullness] of Christ,” as argued by the so-called new perspective on Paul. For an introductory discussion on the new perspective on Paul, see Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008), 528–534.
3 C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1 (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 199.
4 “Faith is the eye that looks to Him [Christ], the hand that receives His free gift, the mouth that drinks the living water” (John Stott, Romans: God’s Good News for the World [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994], 117).
5 On the wrath of God, see Mark D. Baker and Joel B. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 45–49, 70–83.
6 In support of this position, see D. A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21–26: ‘God Presented Him as a Propitiation,’ ” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Theological, and Practical Perspectives, eds. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 124, 125, 138.
7 BDAG, 332.
8 Attempts have been made to translate paresis as“forgiveness.” Most scholars, however, are convinced that there is no sufficient lexical support for such a translation. See, e.g., Sam K. Williams, Jesus’ Death as Saving Event: The Background and Origin of a Concept, Harvard Dissertations in Religion, vol. 2 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), 23–25.
9 As William Barclay points out, “The natural thing to say would be: ‘God is just, and, therefore, condemns the sinner as a criminal’” (The Letter to the Romans, 2nd ed. [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1975], 69).
10 See also Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 183.
11 “God ‘postponed’ the full penalty due sins in the Old Covenant, allowing sinners to stand before Him without their having provided an adequate ‘satisfaction’of the demand of His holy justice” (Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995], 240).
12 Because of this, in many modern languages hilastērion in Hebrews 9:5, as well as its Hebrew equivalent in Exodus 25:17–21 and other OT passages (kappōret), is translated as “propitiatory,” as Jerome already did in the Latin Vulgate. “Mercy seat,” which is more an interpretation than a translation, was introduced by William Tyndale, under the influence of the German Gnadensthul, of the Luther Bible.
13 Martin Pröbstle, Where God and I Meet: The Sanctuary (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 2013), 55.
