NT Text: Romans 3:25-26
OT Source(s):
Source: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Typology + Longitudinal Theme
Anchor Text: Exod 34:6-7 — The Attribute Formula
Significance: There is no verbal quotation here; the allusion is structural. Exodus 34:6-7 holds open the deepest tension in the OT doctrine of God: He is "compassionate and gracious… forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin," yet "He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished." The OT reuses both halves of the formula (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:2-3) without ever resolving how the same God can both forgive the guilty and refuse to clear them. Romans 3:25-26 names that tension and locates its resolution at the cross. Paul's "in His forbearance He had passed over the sins committed beforehand" describes the formula's mercy-half operating across redemptive history — centuries of forgiving without final reckoning — which presses the formula's justice-half into crisis: had God been clearing the guilty after all? The hilastērion answers: God "presented Him as the atoning sacrifice… to demonstrate His righteousness… so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus." At the cross the wrath-clause is executed and the mercy-clauses are honored in a single act: the guilty are not cleared — their guilt is borne — and loving devotion to thousands is maintained. The Attribute Formula thus functions as the OT pre-articulation of substitutionary atonement: what Yahweh proclaimed about Himself on Sinai, with its dynamics left unreconciled, Paul shows reconciled at Calvary. The connection works as theological tension-resolution along the Justice and Mercy trajectory rather than as type-and-antitype — the formula is a divine self-description, and the cross is its demonstration (endeixis), not its escalated replay.