Romans 3:19-28

This passage occurs the week of Reformation Sunday, the last Sunday in October.

Summary:  SOOO many books have been written about these words of Paul.  I humbly offer that a previous or a future generation reading what I write here may shake their head at my misunderstanding!  Obviously all of the classic reformation themes are here:  justification, the cross, God's judgement and faith!

That said, I want to caution against using this passage as a proof text for Jesus as the sacrifice to appease an angry God.  Paul's language seems more invested in Jesus as the revelation of God's mercy rather than propitiator of God's wrath.

Key words:

ἱλαστήριον (meaning "mercy seat", 3:25)  This is a big one, so buckle up.  Most translations here translate this word as "sacrifice" or "means of propitiation."  There there is no evidence in Biblical Greek that this word actually means that.  In Biblical Greek, the word refers only to the Mercy Seat on the ark of the covenant, not that actual thing that was sacrificed.  

If so, this is explosive -- this means the cross is where God meets humanity, where God's mercy is accomplished, yes, but moreover revealed.  Jesus isn't the sacrifice, but the demonstration of God's presence. This allows the cross to become a statement of human sin rather than God's judgement.

So why are they translating it as "means of forgiveness" rather than "place of forgiveness"?  Basically, scholarship in the early 19th century got hung up on the fact that Paul did not use the definite article here for ἱλαστήριον as typical for the Old Testament.  Therefore, they argued, Paul cannot mean the place of redemption.  They also looked in other Greek sources and saw evidence that ἱλαστήριον referred to sacrificial offerings.  Also, at this time, the theology of substitutionary atonement was on the ascendant.  In short, theology got stuck around this word and this idea for about 200 years. 

However, by the late 20th century, some authors were seeking to chip away at this issue and offered that "place of forgiveness" - Jesus as the mercy seat - was a better linguistic translation.  They looked at biblical and Hellenistic sources to offer that Jesus as the mercy seat was a better translation.

I include here significant portion of abstract of a dissertation by Peter Bailey:  

Paul's predication of the term ἱλαστήριον of Jesus combined with his mention of Jesus' own blood leads modern interpreters to speculate that ἱλαστήριον was a term that could denote a sacrificial victim-hence: "whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood" (Rom 3:25, NRSV). But this is unsupported by the Greek sources...  Paul's use of ἱλαστήριον is rooted not in the Greek but in the biblical world. Here ἱλαστήριον refers most famously to the "mercy seat," the golden plate with the cherubim above Israel's ark of the covenant. Philo saw the mercy seat as "a symbol of the gracious power of God" (Mos. 2.96; cf. Fug. 100). Paul applies this symbolism to Jesus because it makes him the centre not only of atonement for sin (Leviticus 16) but of the revelation of God (Exod 25:22; Lev 16:2; Num 7:89). The terms δικαιόω and ἀπολυτρώσεως in Rom 3:24 pick up the language of the exodus (esp. Exod 15: 13) and enable Paul to present Jesus as the centre of the ideal sanctuary (cf. Exod 15: 17).  

Bailey, D. Peter. (1999). Jesus as the Mercy Seat : the semantics and theology of Paul’s use of Hilasterion in Romans 3:25. [Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.17213

In 2023, I did a podcast on this topic and arrived at a similar conclusion.  I wish I had read Mr. Bailey's research first!  He has much better evidence than I did!

If the cross is the mercy seat, than do we fall trap into an understanding of atonement in which Jesus just become a model?  I would say no, because Paul in Romans 6 makes it clear that we must die as well.

Less than key Words

κόσμος (meaning "world", 3:6 and 19) The word "kosmos" (world here) links back to 3.6, where Paul lays out the rhetorical question, is God unrighteous to judge the whole world.

πεφανέρωται (perfect of φανερόω, meaning "appear", 3:21)  Jesus has appeared (past event) but there is still a present implication (here that we are justified through faith). Also the word "testify" (martyre-oo) is in the present suggesting that the "law and prophets" still speak (L and P is used throughout the NT to describe all of the OT (Luke 24:44 is the only place that mentions the Psalms)).