I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God?
The verse asks how a sinful person can be righteous and just before God, and how such a person can be saved. It is the question of one who sees that true religion is seated in the heart and that God's law reaches thoughts as well as words and actions, producing conviction of the need for holiness of heart and not only correctness of outward conduct. It is the anxious inquiry of a transgressor convicted by God's law about how to stand righteous before God.
Martin Luther in his cell at Erfurt and John Wesley and his associates in their striving for holiness wrestled with this same question. The most diligent and prayerful efforts to subdue the evils of the natural heart by a life of self-denial, charity, humiliation, and rigorous exactness in every religious duty in order to gain a holiness that will secure God's favor cannot free a person from the condemnation of sin or break its power. Human reasoning cannot answer the question; only divine revelation provides the answer and lights the path of life, so turning from revelation to human wisdom for this answer is folly.
God's law reveals sin and expresses God's character and holiness, but viewed by one fallen through sin it becomes a voice of condemnation and a ministration of death with no province to pardon, no power to justify anyone, and no ray of hope, so it provides no answer to the sinner's question. A person is brought into harmony with God and holiness only through Christ, and the way to come to Christ begins with repentance, with repentance and conversion leading to sins being blotted out. The answer is found not in the law but through Christ, who came in the flesh to condemn sin in the flesh and who lays hold of the repenting soul with an unyielding grasp while grasping the throne of God, becoming the connecting link between humanity and divinity and between earth and heaven and the only refuge for the guilty soul.
The verse asks how a sinful person can be righteous and just before God, and how such a person can be saved. It is the question of one who sees that true religion is seated in the heart and that God's law reaches thoughts as well as words and actions, producing conviction of the need for holiness of heart and not only correctness of outward conduct. It is the anxious inquiry of a transgressor convicted by God's law about how to stand righteous before God.
Martin Luther in his cell at Erfurt and John Wesley and his associates in their striving for holiness wrestled with this same question. The most diligent and prayerful efforts to subdue the evils of the natural heart by a life of self-denial, charity, humiliation, and rigorous exactness in every religious duty in order to gain a holiness that will secure God's favor cannot free a person from the condemnation of sin or break its power. Human reasoning cannot answer the question; only divine revelation provides the answer and lights the path of life, so turning from revelation to human wisdom for this answer is folly.
God's law reveals sin and expresses God's character and holiness, but viewed by one fallen through sin it becomes a voice of condemnation and a ministration of death with no province to pardon, no power to justify anyone, and no ray of hope, so it provides no answer to the sinner's question. A person is brought into harmony with God and holiness only through Christ, and the way to come to Christ begins with repentance, with repentance and conversion leading to sins being blotted out. The answer is found not in the law but through Christ, who came in the flesh to condemn sin in the flesh and who lays hold of the repenting soul with an unyielding grasp while grasping the throne of God, becoming the connecting link between humanity and divinity and between earth and heaven and the only refuge for the guilty soul.