NOTES for Рим 3:21-31
Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul turns to one of the key biblical concepts: the concept of righteousness. He says that with the coming of Christ into the world the situation in this respect changed radically: now righteousness has been revealed in all its fullness together with the Kingdom that the Messiah brought (vv. 21-22). Previously righteousness was attained with God's help, but still through human effort; now it has entered the world through Jesus and has become part of that life of the Kingdom which He brought with Him and to which everyone can now be joined, if only he is ready to trust Jesus (v. 24). And this righteousness brought into the world by Jesus is incomparable with the righteousness revealed even by the greatest righteous people of the former age: the fullness of righteousness means freedom from sin, and before the coming of Jesus Christ into the world no person was free from it (v. 23).
It is not accidental that the apostle connects this fullness of righteousness with the concept of redemption reflected in the Torah (vv. 25-26): just as one who ransomed a slave gave him freedom from slavery, which the slave would never have attained by his own efforts, so also Jesus, revealing to the world the fullness of righteousness, freed from the power of sin those who sought this righteousness but could not completely free themselves from sin by their own strength. And the fullness of righteousness brought into the world by Jesus is inseparable from the fullness of the Kingdom: it frees the faithful from every sin, because it is incompatible with any sin just as the Kingdom is incompatible with any evil (v. 25). It is no accident that Paul calls what Jesus did for His faithful a "sacrifice of mercy": the corresponding Hebrew word meant precisely the readiness to give the one toward whom mercy is shown something that he plainly has not deserved, something to which he has no right either by law or by an agreement concluded between the parties.
If this is so, if righteousness cannot be attained by any "works of the Torah" (v. 28), then the Torah itself becomes truly universal: righteousness is acquired only through the faithfulness that binds the one seeking righteousness to God through Jesus Christ (vv. 27-28). Here there is no difference between Jew and Gentile: the former Gentile who has trusted Jesus and through Him received the Kingdom receives the same fullness of righteous life as the Jew who from childhood was accustomed to following the Torah (vv. 29-30). But this by no means diminishes the significance of the Torah: the Torah is not simply a text; the Torah is the spiritual law that determines a person's relationship with God for as long as the person himself exists. Such a Torah remains unshakable even after the coming of Christ into the world, because it remains the foundation of a person's spiritual life not only in our world, not yet transformed to the end, but also in the Kingdom.