Righteousness! - [Romans 3:21-26]

Pascal’s Wager and the Need for a Biblical View of God

A few days ago, an atheist friend of mine posted a meme, and it got me thinking. In fact, I sent him a rather long private response because I don't like blasting people on Facebook publicly. Let me read you.

This is a meme. I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is. Now, this is something called Pascal's Wager, Pascal being a mathematician, which he should have stuck to, a theologian, and a philosopher.

And Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not exist, such a person will have only a finite, meaning a measurable loss. He'll lose some pleasures, luxury, etc.

Whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains. You're playing with house money, in other words, is the idea of Pascal. Go ahead and believe in God. You're not going to lose that much.

And if you're right, your rewards are great. I could spend, like, probably a couple weeks in Sunday school talking about all the flaws with that, and you guys would probably help me with additional ideas.

I mean, just a few. First of all, it's not a biblical concept. I mean, it's better than, you know, a funeral I was at once where the pastor said, you should try Jesus for six months and see if he makes a difference in your life.

That was bad. But the whole idea of the gospel, it doesn't present itself to a what-if kind of proposition. In fact, the Bible never explains the existence of God. It declares it, right? It's propositional truth is how we frame it.

But this Pascal's wager is based on a wrong view of man and a wrong view of God. It says nothing about sin. It says, basically, you can set your own standard for how you would like to live your life and assume that it would be pleasing to God.

It doesn't say anything about scripture. It says nothing about God's holiness, his sovereignty, and it really doesn't give us any kind of theology. And then, of course, there's the complete absence of Jesus, which is a real problem.

I mean, you could just narrow it down to this. Believe in God. Well, what God exactly? We need clarity when we're going to talk about God. We don't need some kind of theological hash. Let's just open up the refrigerator, dump everything in, throw it in the oven and see what comes out.

I guess it's also a casserole, but sorry. Let's open our Bibles to Romans chapter three, Romans chapter three, which verses 21 to 26, really the hearts of this book. Romans chapter three, verses 21 to 26.

The Righteousness of God Revealed Apart from the Law

The apostle Paul, by the power of the Holy Spirit, writes this. And as I'm reading it, I want you to just notice how many times the righteousness of God or his righteousness or God's righteousness appears here.

I'll give you a hint. It's more than two. It's more than three. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Commentator Morris said this. He says this is possibly the most important single paragraph ever written. If you came here expecting to hear nice stories or maybe how to get along in your life, I'm not going to give you that this morning.

Possibly the most important single paragraph ever written. And if we think about where this is, Paul's just spent the bulk of two chapters talking about the universal plight of mankind, and it's this.

If you're a human being, and most of us here qualify, all of us qualify, you are guilty of sin. You stand condemned. If you're a Jew, you're condemned. If you're a Gentile, you're condemned. Right before this, in chapter three, if you recall, quoting the Old Testament Psalms, he says, there is none righteous, no, not one, and he goes on.

And I mean, there's this picture of bleakness, of hopelessness. But before he went into that, in chapter one, he did write this, and I read it earlier, which tells us about the power of the gospel we're going to talk about this morning.

Listen to Romans chapter one, verses 16 and 17, for I, Paul, am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

The power of God unto salvation. Unlike what Pascal said, you can't just live your life as if some nebulous God exists, set your own standard. God sets the standard, and it's the preaching of his word.

It's the hearing of his word. That's what causes us to understand our sinfulness, the glories of Christ. And in this paragraph, in verses 21 to 26, Paul describes for us the heart of the gospel, which is the imputation, the granting, the accounting of the righteousness of God to those who have none of their own.

We need that righteousness. This paragraph tells us how that happens. In it, we'll see themes like justification, atonement, redemption. You say, I don't want to learn all these big words. I don't know what to tell you.

These are themes of scripture that we need to understand. And this morning, we're going to talk about righteousness. That's why I call it righteousness, right? We need it. We're going to talk about what it is, why we need it, and how we get it.

And I've just divided it into two, because there isn't some glorious outline I have here. I just have righteousness displayed, and then, if I can find the other point, righteousness, we have another point about, oh, righteousness delivered.

There it is. Sorry. Sorry. Verse 21, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. When you see that but now, something's changed, right? There's something different. Well, what is it?

Did God's standard change? Did he say, you know, this is the way you used to get saved, and now there's a different way of getting saved? No. Back to verse 20, so that we can understand this. For by the works of the law, in other words, by keeping the law, by obeying the law, listen, no human being will be justified in his sight, in God's sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

In other words, here's what the law is good for, for showing you that you fail. If we just put the law like Jesus did, they said, what's the great commandment? And he said, the greatest commandment is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The second is, like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself, right? And we could categorize the ten commandments under those two headings. And guess what? We fail. We don't love God as we ought to, and we don't love our neighbors as we ought to.

There's no such thing as good enough or some kind of self-earned righteousness. The law reminds me, I was thinking about this the other day, I thought, it reminds me of a dog owner I know, used to have a Jack Russell Terrier.

And he would put, I'll just call it bait, up on the tree. And his dog would get a running start and leap and claw and climb and try to get to that bait. Just do it for hours, I mean, it seemed like hours.

Just keep going and going and going and going. And I thought, that's what the law's like. The law is like that bait, and we can't get there no matter how we try. And as a matter of fact, I would put it this way, that Jack Russell Terrier got a lot closer to that bait than we would ever get to righteousness.

We can't do it. You can keep running and jumping and scratching and clawing, but you're never going to get there. And the truth is, we're not even close. So what do people do? They lower the bar. They set their own standard.

They think, like my atheistic friend, well, if there is a God, certainly I'm a good person. In other words, I'm going to, I mean, this is akin to saying, I'm going to set the world high jump record, right?

And I'm going to create a brick, maybe like a two inch brick, because that's about all I could jump over. Jump over it and then pronounce myself the Olympic champion. It doesn't work. It's absurd. And people who think they are good enough to get into heaven, that they're better than someone else, are doing something just as absurd.

The next part of this verse really gives it away about this standard and its depth, says, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. Well, what does that mean? Says this, that there's always been a standard and we could never meet it.

And God knew that. If we, I mean, I love Genesis 3, and I said that back when I preached through it. I love Genesis 3, why? Because so many questions are answered in it. What did God do immediately after Adam and Eve sinned and they had these fig leaves on?

He killed an animal and clothed them, why? That set in motion this whole sacrificial system. People from then on brought sacrifices before God, why? Because they were guilty, guilty of sin, and they knew it.

But what do the law and the prophets bear witness to? What do they tell us? And ultimately, it's not a what, it's a who. And we could read Hebrews chapter 11 and understand it's not by works, but by faith that people are saved.

In fact, if we went on to Romans chapter 4, we'd see again. It's not by works that Abraham was saved, it was by faith. He believed God and it was what? Counted to him or reckoned to him as righteousness.

Wasn't that he was righteous, it's that God said, I will take your faith in one who will come and die for your sins, and that will be counted to you as righteousness. But this idea of Moses and all the prophets, I said it was Old Testament.

What did I say it was? It's the law and the prophets. Law is what? The books written by Moses. In other words, here's the idea. This is the Old Testament. Jesus on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, 27 said this.

In beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them, these men, he came alongside these disciples. He came alongside on the road to Emmaus. He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

While this was just after the resurrection, this could only refer to the Old Testament. On Resurrection Sunday, that evening, when he meets with the disciples as they're gathering, trying to figure out what to do, then he, Jesus, said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you.

That everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Paul before Agrippa, when he's testifying before him in Acts 26, says this.

To this day, I have had the help that comes from God, so that I stand here, testifying both to small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass. The Old Testament pointed to this manifestation, this display of God's righteousness in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

So there's a consistency, a continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. They all speak of Jesus Christ. They're all pointing to him. Look at verse 22. Says the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction.

There's no distinction, what? Between persons of the old covenant who believed and the new covenant who believe. We believe in, they believed in one who would come. We believe in the one who has come.

There's also no distinction today around the world. Are the believers in China, or the believers in North Korea, or the believers in Africa, or the believers in France, are they any less justified than we are?

No, there is no distinction. God is no respecter of persons. The perfect righteousness of God is available to all who believe. That means this, that the perfection we need and cannot achieve, right? We need to get into heaven.

We want to get into heaven. We don't want to go to hell. The only way to get into heaven is to be absolutely perfect. Be perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect. We need that perfection. We can't do it ourselves.

What we cannot earn is granted to us through faith. And through, the reason I say through and not by, through is a very important word because it shows that faith is the instrument. It's the means of salvation and not the cause.

If I say to you, you must believe, that's true, right? If I say to you, your faith has saved you, that's true. Where did the faith come from? It came as a gift. So if I say to you, you must generate faith on your own, you can't do it.

That's the problem with Pascal's wager, right? Just believe. Well, you can't believe. You can't seek. You can't do anything. That's the whole point of Romans all the way up through this. If faith is the cause of us having righteousness or perfection, then it's something that we do, right?

Now we're going into Ephesians 2 territory. We don't do this. We can't do this. We believe, the theory would go, we believe and therefore God grants us righteousness. But here's the picture. That's wrong.

Here's the right picture. Believers, every single one of us who believe used to be an unbeliever. I mean, there's a startling statement. Write that down. Believers used to be unbelievers. Amazing. What does that mean though?

It means that each one of us was dead in our sins and trespasses. It meant that we probably heard the gospel who knows how many times. And it just went right like this. Just right past us, meant nothing to us.

And then one day God caused us to be born again. John chapter three, the Holy Spirit does that. God caused us to be born again. First Peter chapter one. God gave us life. Ephesians chapter two. This is what happens.

God brings us to life and we believe. What was once foolish becomes precious. And again, showing the instrumentality. Look at verse 22 again. Through faith in Jesus Christ. Now that faith, that instrument of salvation has to have an object.

You can't just be a person of faith. You can't just be a person who believes in God. You have to believe in Jesus Christ. I was listening to S. Lewis Johnson the other day and he said this. This is kind of my adaptation of what he said.

When he was defining faith and what it meant to be saved. He said, faith is to have the same view of the person and work of Jesus Christ as the father does. To have the same view of what Jesus did as the father does.

The father looks at the son's work. He looks at his obedience. And you know what he says? I'm well pleased. I'm satisfied. The work is done. It's finished. We struggle with that, right? There are times where I want to trust Jesus.

I want to believe him, but I don't feel so good about myself. Trust in the person and work of Jesus. It's good that you don't feel good about yourself, right? You can't measure up. I mean, it's tempting at this point for me to give you a spiritual checklist.

How to make sure that you're really in Christ. These things, here's how the father views the work of Jesus. Here are the 18 things you need to do to make sure that you're viewing things the right way.

Could be three things, doesn't matter. Is this a gospel passage or is it a law passage? I think it's a gospel passage. And if I give you a checklist, what is that? It's a law. And you know what? If I could just share this with you, whatever rules I give you, you're going to fail.

I think there is one kind of litmus test, and I'll tell you why I think it's a litmus test. It's because every one of us is going to go through it, death. Let's turn for a moment to 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Corinthians 15, verses 55 to 58.

I mean, I don't know about you, but I've seen, and I don't know if these reports are true, but I've seen reports coming out of Afghanistan. And I just listened to what these phone calls say, and I'm going, if that's true, if these things are actually happening, I don't know if I could do that.

I don't know if I could handle that, but these people are doing it. 1 Corinthians 15, verse 55, oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, and listen, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in vain.

Paul says that before the law, we are sinners, right? And if we're thinking, you know, I'm about to die, what about my sins? What about my unconfessed sins? What about the sins that I've not asked forgiveness for?

What's going to happen to me? We're thinking not highly enough. You can go back to Romans chapter 3. We're not thinking highly about what Jesus did, not highly enough. When Christians face death, they ought not fear it.

Why? Because to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Look what he says instead, or you can't look because I told you to turn back, but listen to what he said. Listen to what he said that we should do instead of, you know, having fear, instead of worrying about death.

He says, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Why? Why? Because that's why you're here, right? If it was just all about getting saved and then going to glory, well, that would be it.

You get saved and boom, you're gone. We're here to fulfill the great commission, to make disciples, to encourage one another, to bear one another's burdens, to do all those things. It's pretty tough to do that if we can't leave our homes.

It's pretty tough to do that if we're living in fear. If the greatest enemy is death and Jesus Christ has conquered death, what do we have to fear? Now, I want to return to S. Lewis's definition, S. Lewis Johnson's definition of faith, to have the same view of the person and work of Jesus as the father does.

Does the father, does he ever wobble about whether Jesus did enough? No. In fact, we read that in Romans chapter one. On the basis of the resurrection, he showed that he was satisfied with the death of Jesus.

And again, as I just think about the martyrs that are being made all around the world, this came to mind, Romans chapter eight, very familiar verses. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? As we think about these people who are being slain for their faith in Christ, shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword separate us from the love of Christ?

No. As it is written, for your sake, for the sake of Jesus, for his glory. We are being killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. Knowing all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

The worst thing that can happen to us in this life, death, is the best thing that can happen to us. And this is true. Look back to verse 22. For all who believe, they have this righteousness. There is no distinction.

Again, what does it mean to believe, to know, to have knowledge, to assent, to say, yes, those things are true, and then to trust them, right? That's what it means to believe. Every single person who believes will have his perfections, the perfections of Jesus, accounted or imputed to them.

People of every tribe, nation, and tongue. Those who were formerly in Adam, in the first Adam, are now in Christ, in the second Christ. What the first Adam failed to do, live perfectly, Jesus did. He actually did it.

I think it's interesting, looking at verse 23. It's interesting here, how often do we use this when we're evangelizing people? For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. I've done it a million times.

Not a million. I don't know how, you know, the Lord knows how many times. I don't know. A lot. And as I was studying this, I'm going, well, it's true, right? I mean, I'd rather go now to Romans 3, verses 10 to 12 and read that, then use this one again, and I'll tell you why.

It is true that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But if we just peek ahead at verse 24, what happens? And are justified, right? All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified.

What does that mean? If we're talking about a universal all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, then we've got a universal justified by his grace. So there's a little issue there. But if we look back at verse 22, we see it's qualified, right, by who believe.

So, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God means what? That every single believer is a sinner. They have no merit. They have nothing to stand on, no earned righteousness. They can't do it.

But now Jesus has been put on display for us. He has come. So we've seen righteousness displayed and now we have righteousness delivered. Verse 24, and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Now, justified, I've heard this and probably many of you have, you know, just as if I've never sinned. Does that go far enough? And I'll just give you the answer. No, it doesn't. It's a twofold declaration.

God, judicially, as it were, says, you're not guilty and you are righteous. You didn't violate the law. I'm declaring you innocent, but I'm also saying that you perfectly kept the law. You are righteous.

And some say, well, that's some kind of theological or legal fiction. You know, it just doesn't work. Well, it does. It's a reality of the work of Christ. Listen to 2 Corinthians 5 .21. For our sake, for our benefit, he, God, made him, the son, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin.

What does that mean exactly? It means that when Jesus Christ went to the cross, all of our sin was placed on him. Then he goes on to say, so that in him, in Jesus, we might become the righteousness of God.

In other words, he pays for our sin and then we get his righteousness. We get that accounted to us. Jesus never sinned, but our sins are placed on him. We never obeyed, at least not perfectly, but the righteousness of Jesus is accounted to us.

That's what it means to become the righteousness of God. We are given a right standing with him. That song, his robes for mine, what does it mean? That's a picture of that double imputation, not amputation, but imputation.

Double imputation means this, his robe, his righteousness is placed on me. My robe, my sin placed on him. He paid the price for my sin and I get his righteousness. That's what it means to be in Christ.

Thinking about pastor Bob and how he would stress being in Christ. So vital. I can't stand before a holy God and say, look at me, look what I did. I sought you my whole life. I was a spiritual person.

I can't do that. I need to be in Christ. I need his righteousness. It's a one-time act. And let me just say one other thing about justification, one-time declaration by God. There are some who teach, many who teach wrongly, and some of you may like Richard Baxter, but there are a number of Baxterites among us today who say that, oh yes, God declares you righteous, but at the judgment seat, you need to have sufficient works to get through what?

To get through final justification. It's like there's jeopardy and then there's final jeopardy. God's work, or in his word, Christ's work is finished. When he says not guilty and in fact righteous, he doesn't go, well, now let's see how Steve does, right?

It's not like Jesus gets us up to neutral and then we have to climb the stairway to heaven. We have to climb Jacob's ladder by ourselves. You know, it's hand over hand, all the way up. No, it is done.

It is finished. Look at verse 24, by his grace as a gift, by his grace as a gift, just think if he gave us some kind of conditional accounting.

No, no, no, no, no.

To say something about grace here, some say, sure, it's a gift, but you have to accept it. Is that true? Yes. Right? It is true. But the way they talk about it, grace is some nebulous substance. The theologians call it provenient grace.

It's some kind of nebulous substance that, I don't know, it's like floating cotton candy and you just pluck it out of the air because it's available to everybody. You just have to grab it. It's a wrong view of grace.

Here's the right view. The right view is you're dead in your sins and trespasses, and God, in his grace, in his kindness, in his mercy, effectually works in you. Not provenient grace, but effective grace, effectual grace.

We are objects of his grace. Listen to the London Baptist Confession of Faith. The effectual call is of God's free and special grace alone, not from anything at all foreseen in man. In other words, he doesn't look down the course of time, see who will believe, nor from any power or agency in the creature.

In other words, not because there's some little bit of righteousness still left in us, some kind of free will in us where we can choose. Listen, being wholly passive therein, being dead in sins and trespasses, not from anything at all foreseen in man.

Not from any sin or sin and trespasses until being quickened. In other words, being regenerated, being caused to be born again and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call.

In other words, Holy Spirit causes you to come to spiritual life, and now you have the power to accept grace. But listen what it says then, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it, and that by no less power than that which raised up Christ from the dead.

The same power that raised Jesus up from the dead brings you to spiritual life. And let me just add this, no regenerated person, in other words, if you've been born again, there is no one who refuses, who's had that happen to them, who refuses the grace of God.

Why? Because that's part of the grace of God. He doesn't believe for you, but he so inclines your will and brings you to spiritual life so that you will believe. Back to verse 24, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Now what does it mean to be redeemed? What is redemption? To be redeemed is an action of buying back a slave or a captive through payment of a ransom, hence being set free, released. And you think to yourself, well, I was never a slave of anyone.

You sound like who? The Pharisees, right? You can't say that because Romans 6 would tell us this, that every single person before salvation is a slave of sin, been set free indeed from sin. Jesus paid the price for our sins, setting us free from the penalty of sin and its power.

We can now obey. Do we obey perfectly? No. Why? Because we have a remaining sin nature. It's still kind of hanging around, waiting to be eradicated when we go to glory. On to verse 25, whom God put forward, talking about Jesus, put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith, whom God put forward in the sense that he put him on display, right?

That he sent his son. That was the plan from the beginning. There was no plan B. This was always the plan, that the eternal son, the second person of the Trinity would come to earth and redeem a people.

He would redeem the elect. He would redeem those chosen by the father. And again, what was unknown in the Old Testament was who it would be. They didn't understand it. They knew that God would make a provision.

They didn't know that that provision would be his son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, that word propitiation, what does that mean? It means satisfaction. If we think, in fact, it gives a picture of the mercy seats on the Ark of the Covenant, where sacrifices would take place.

And if we think about Old Testament sacrifices and all the animals that were sacrificed, and we know what? That the sacrifice of bulls and goats, everything else, could not remove sin. But Jesus is a propitiation, a satisfaction, an actual atonement.

He actually makes us right with God. Who else could do this? Who else could be the sinless sacrifice? Who else could take upon himself the full wrath of God for every sin of every believer? And the answer is nobody else could.

What did John the Baptist say? Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Talking about Jesus. Only he could do that. John Calvin said this, God, in order to remove any obstacle to his love towards us.

And you just think, okay, what would stop God from just lavishing us with love? Well, our sin. God hates sin. And again, we often hear, I mean, there's so many truisms. And if you want to know where truisms come from, if they're not in the Bible, there's one other source for them.

And it's not good. God hates sin, but loves sinners. Okay, there's a problem with that. And if we want to know the problem with that, there's two ways we could go. One is to look at the scripture and see how it says that he hates the wicked, right?

He doesn't love sinners indiscriminately. And if we want to understand how God feels about sin, and really how he feels about sinners, what do we do? We look at the cross. We look at the cross. When we see how God poured, the Father poured his wrath out on the Son, we understand that the Father hates sin.

How much did he hate it? That much. And he transforms us through the work of his Son. Moves us from being sinners who hate him to sinners who love him, who have the right attitude, who long to be free from their sin.

Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for sin. When he said, it is finished, what do you mean? He meant the redemption, the work that he was sent here to do, that every single person that he had come to save had had their sins paid for.

He is the propitiation, the satisfaction of the wrath of God for our sins. And again, Paul writes that, in verse 25, to be received by faith. He's emphasizing this theme of faith, that we would do it by faith, not by baptism, not by church attendance, not by feeding the poor, not by any work, but by believing, by trusting.

He goes on to say, this was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. Throughout our lives, throughout the Old Testament, people were sinning. We were sinning against God.

But he did not, I mean, I just think of the multiple times. And I probably, if we talked long enough to all of you, and we just opened it up and we talked about it, there probably have been a number of you that are saved now and faced a possible life-threatening situation before you got saved.

Did God not, in his providence, preserve your life because he knew that you weren't saved and that there was a point where you would believe? I believe he did, right? Sovereignly, he wasn't going to lose you.

But even in the Old Testament, none of the sacrifices removed sins. They were just signs of obedience, so they kept doing these things, and they pointed towards the ultimate redemption, the ultimate atonement.

And it would be fair for God, would be perfectly right of God, the moment anybody sins, to demand payment, which the payment for sin is death. But in his divine forbearance, in other words, in his restraints, he didn't do that.

Instead, he waits. He waits until the Lord Jesus Christ dies on the cross. That's the payment. In other words, I mean, we can look at it to be a little crass about it. The sins of the Old Testament saints were on the installment plan, right?

It was like, I'm gonna hold your punishment in abeyance until Jesus goes to the cross. And that's what he did. Verse 26, it was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Could God be just? Could he be just or righteous and fail to punish sin? Could he just overlook sin? Could he just say, you know what, you tried. You lived your life like there was a God, and that's good enough for me.

He could do that, but then he wouldn't be just or righteous, and he is. He had to punish every sin. Would it be just for God to have different standards for different people to get into heaven? Could he grade on a curve?

No. He had to be just, and he had to be the justifier. Justice and mercy meet at the cross and only at the cross. There's no place else. There's no other time in history where those two things come together in such a way.