A prison constable in Canada once noticed a little cross hanging from a prisoner’s neck. That struck him as odd because he knew this prisoner was not a religious man. So he took a closer look at that little cross and noticed a little protrusion from the top. He discovered that that little protrusion could unlock just about any set of handcuffs—and he uncovered a plot whereby many prisoners planned to free themselves with similar crosses.
There is a cross that sets prisoners free, and it is the cross of Jesus Christ. That cross opens up the hearts of people who are shackled by shame and sin and desperation.
The third chapter of Romans is in part a message of freeing prisoners. In verse 9, the Apostle Paul takes us into the interrogation room where the prisoner is stripped naked before God, then into the throne room where he is given the robe of righteousness. Paul has been going on about the wrath of God. Three words sum up everything he has said at this point.
The first one is guilt. “What then?” he asks in verses 9-12. “Are we better than they? Not at all. For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one.”
This is the perfect and complete indictment. How many are righteous? None. How many are guilty? All. So he makes his point iron clad to say, no matter who you are, God has pronounced all of humanity under judgment.
The second word is gift. Verses 21-23: “But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
These are some of the most wonderful verses in all of Scripture. This is the text that changed the life of Martin Luther. Luther was confessing every sin he could possibly think of that he was committing—or thought that he might have committed—and the reason was that he thought the phrase the righteousness of God meant the righteousness that God has in Himself and by which He punishes everyone else.
Luther said, “Night and day I pondered until I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby through grace and sheer mercy, He justifies us by faith. I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”
What Luther discovered is that the righteousness of God is not the guilt but the gift of God. And that is what set the Protestant Reformation afoot.
The third word is grace: Verses 24-26: “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood … because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
There are three theology words in this text that describe how grace works. Justification means to declare someone righteous and then to treat that person based on that declaration. You might ask how this works. A Puritan named Henry Smith put it like this: “Christ hides our unrighteousness with His righteousness. He covers our disobedience with His obedience. He shadows our death with His death so that the wrath of God cannot find us.” I love that. The wrath of God cannot find us.
Redemption. That’s the language of the slave market. It means to set free by paying a price. There’s a great parable in Matthew 13 called the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price, and it’s about a merchant who sold everything that he had to buy a valuable pearl that he found. Now, I have heard that interpreted as we are giving up everything to find God. We’re selling all that we have because God is worth it.
I think it’s a parable of how God values you so much that He would give up or leave the glories of Heaven, come to this Earth, take on human flesh and pay the price of redemption because He sees people as valuable. We’re that pearl.
Propitiation. The basic idea is to satisfy the wrath of God. The wrath, the judgment, of God was satisfied by the blood of Christ on the cross so that He could hide you in His perfection. The Greek word literally means mercy seat, and it hearkens back to the Old Testament when there was the Ark of the Covenant, and on top of the Ark was a lid of pure gold called the mercy seat.
Inside the Ark was a copy of the Ten Commandments, which the children of Israel broke over and over again. So God said, “The only place I will meet with you is on the mercy seat when the blood is applied.”
And today, the only place God will meet with people is over the shed blood of Jesus Christ. That is a message we must never shy away from. “There is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). It’s how prisoners are set free—not by a little protrusion from a cross on a prisoner’s neck, but by the cross of Jesus Christ, the only key to our liberty. ©2024 Skip Heitzig
Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version.
Skip Heitzig is founder and senior pastor of Calvary Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a Calvary Chapel Fellowship.
This article was adapted from a devotional message during the God Loves You UK Tour in Birmingham, England, June 15, 2024.
Photo: Courtesy of Skip Heitzig