You mean the righteousness by which I will be saved is not mine?

When I discovered that, the doors of paradise swung open and I walked through.

In the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written,

the just shall live by faith.

A verse taken from the book of Abakak in the Old Testament that is cited three

times in the New Testament.

As Luther was stopped short, he said, what does this mean?

That there's this righteousness that is by faith.

And from faith to faith, what does it mean that the righteous shall live by faith? Which again,

as I said, was the thematic verse for the whole exposition of the gospel that Paul sets forth

here in the book of Romans.

And so the lights came on for Luther, and he began to understand that what Paul was speaking

up here was a righteousness that God in His grace was making available to those who would receive it passively, not those

who would achieve it actively, but that would receive it by faith and by which a person

could be reconciled to a holy and righteous God.

Now there was a linguistic trick that was going on here too.

And it was this, that the Latin word for justification that was used at this time in church history was, I mean, it's the word from which

we get the English word justification, the Latin word eustofacare. And it came from the Roman

judicial system. And the term eustafacare, it's made up of the word eustace, which is justice or

righteousness, and the verb, the infinitive facare, which means to make. And so the Latin fathers

understood the doctrine of justification is what happens when God, through the sacraments

of the church and elsewhere, makes unrighteous people righteous.

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