Let us review our progress so far as we are journeying through this great work of Paul. After preliminary introductions Paul began asking the question, “Who needs the gospel?” He points out how the Gentiles needed it. He follows up by telling us that the Jews needed it. In fact we all need it, because we are all living out our lives the wrath of God… the wrath of God being the condition we place ourselves through rejecting to live in the way God would have us live.
So how do we get the gospel? Good news and bad. The bad news is that we can’t get it though our good works no matter how hard we try. The Good news is that through the grace of God it can get us! The Gospel comes to us as we put our faith in what God has done in Jesus Christ. It comes as we recognize that in Christ we are put right, ‘justified’ by God, that God chooses to clothe our ‘not right’ (or unrighteous lives) with the ‘right-ness” (or righteousness) of Christ’s love… something that is gloriously possible because God raised Christ from death.
To illustrate his point Paul talks about the faith of Abraham, who was accepted by God not because he was a particularly good person, or because he went through some rituals like that of circumcision, but accepted by God because he trusted in God. Everything else that happened to Abraham was a response to God’s love, not a reason for his acceptance by God.
That is an all to brief summary but it leads us into what comes next… if we know who needs the gospel and we know how people get it, the next question Paul addresses is “What are the results of it?” or “How should receiving the gospel in faith be affecting our lives?”
So let us begin…
NRS Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we1 have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access1 to this grace in which we stand; and we2 boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we1 also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Briefly stated… faith in Christ brings peace in changing circumstances. The kind of peace that is elsewhere expressed as a ‘peace which passes all understanding’. Paul speaks about peace as though it is a place we are led into, using in verse 2 the phrase ‘we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand’
When I was a kid growing up in Liverpool I used to spend a whole lot of time going to rock concerts to see the stars of the day. I always used to dream of not just having a ticket, but ‘an all access pass’… y’know the kind that you could hold up and which would let you go backstage and hang out with the band as if you were a personal friend. Of course I never got one.
Paul tells us though that in Christ we are ‘given a free backstage pass’; taken by the hand and led into the very presence of God, the holy of holies, that His redeeming love and grace admit us to a place of peace with God. For Paul that peace was such a reality, such a tangible thing that it even changed the way he looked at the troubles that came his way. Suffering became something positive that he saw as capable of deepening his faith and his hope and his trust.
Paul was not a person given to boasting about things but he was prepared to boast about the fact of God’s grace being so great it had led him to that place of peace and security in God. Why did he feel comfortable with such boasting? Well there it is… in verse 5… he boasts ‘because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit’. He was at peace because he believed that whatever came his way God would use it for some good purpose. It was all a result of the gospel coming into his life.
Let’s continue to follow his argument.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person -- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.1 10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. 11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Paul begins by enforcing the notion that salvation is something that we cannot do for ourselves… we don’t have the strength, morally, physically, righteously or in any other way. He describes the human condition as one of ‘weakness’. This of course grates on our pride. In a culture like ours where we are told that all we have to do to succeed is try hard enough and where weakness is seen as a sign of incompetence or inability to profess our weakness goes against the grain.
But it is entirely consistent with Christ’s teaching of how to find ourselves we must lose ourselves, how before there can really be life there has to be death. How to receive the gospel and know the power of God enabling us we have to have faith as of a little child, a child of course in society at that time is one who had no power, no rights and was extremely venerable and dependent on their parents. So to receive the gospel we have to be dependent upon God. But let’s look at the whole verse… For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
The phrase ‘At the right time’ is also significant. The historical facts behind the spread of Christianity are remarkable. As Christ’s coming relates to Jewish history, there was never such a time as their overthrow by the Romans that had unleashed in the Jewish spirit so much in the way of Messianic expectations. They were desperate for a Savior! Indeed their were many who laid claim to be that savior, either individuals or corporate movements, some violent like the zealots, some peaceful like the Essenes. Both shared a common concern… to usher in a new Messianic age. Christ came at the right time in religious history.
The growth of Christianity would not have been possible if there had not been an empire through which to spread. Christianity arrived during one of history’s greatest periods of unity. The Roman Empire was all embracing and created avenues through which the Christian faith spread throughout much of the then known world. This is the letter to the ‘Romans’… the Roman Christian Church being at the center of the power of the Empire. It was ‘the right time’
Philosophically also the development of Christian thought was not independent of the cultures in which it grew. This was a period of a tremendous blossoming of consciousness, an age in which reasoning and debate flourished… stoicism, platonism, you name it ‘isms’ provided an intellectual climate that engaged the greatest minds of the day. Again it was ‘the right time’.
And the gospel comes at the right time in a particular way. ‘Christ died for the ungodly.’ This is Paul’s great remedy for the human condition of sin that he reinforces in verse 8; ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.’
He points out how this is an exceptional event that takes place not ‘because of who we are’ but ‘in spite of who we are’. He talks of how acts of heroism are not unknown. People give their lives to defend their families, defend their friends, defend even their nation, all of which is admirable and a great expression of love, but this death… the death of Christ… is one in which His life is given for those who are enemies.
It is this self-giving, this undeserved act that can be for us a path out from under the wrath of God. Do you remember how we earlier described wrath? Not as the thought that God sits in heaven constantly angry at the world… but wrath as the feeling that our lives are just dragging along through some dismal, pointless swamp, that we just exist without purpose or meaning. The heaviness of pointlessness. Living under the shadow of death.
Verse 9 ‘Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.” The reference to blood there throws us back to the previous chapter where Paul talks of the Jewish concept of sacrifice. Of how Christ had become both the sacrificial animal and the place of sacrifice uniting those two concepts in Himself.
The force of what Christ had done through His death upon the Cross is captured in a word used at the end of verse 11 ‘reconciliation’ (in Greek katallagh,, katallago) meaning both ‘being put into friendship with God’ and ‘leading others to be put into friendship with God’.
The implication is plain. It is through Christ that our relationship with God can be restored, that life can take on an eternal dimension, that we are free from the sense of living only to die, that we can ‘be-right’ with God in the sense that our lives are on the right track, despite the changing circumstances that come at us. So again we are back with this thought, “What difference does the gospel make?” It brings peace to our hearts, a new center for our existence and being.
But more than just peace… it also brings forgiveness. In our next passage Paul contrasts the sin of Adam (humankind) with the grace of Jesus Christ.
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned -- 13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. 14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. 15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. 16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.
Let’s follow this argument verse by verse.
1. Genesis gives us the account of Adam, the prototype human, who falls from God, loses his innocence and blessedness and is thrown out of the garden to live under the shadow of death. We are all ‘Adam’. We all have lost our innocence, lost our relationship with God and live under deaths shadow because we all have sinned.
2. Though we have all sinned we may not have always considered what we did as sin, because we didn’t know any better. It took the law to do that. Kind of like if you get a speeding ticket for going 50 in a 30 mile limit, it’s no good saying “Well, I didn’t see the sign”… when the cop stops you that’s irrelevant… you still did the crime and so you’ll still get a ticket.
3. So regardless if we consider ourselves a child of Adam or a child of Moses, we’re still separated from God and the huge abyss of death dominates the landscape of our lives. “Death exercises dominion’ as it reads in verse 14. Yet, Adam, the one who got us into this, the prototype sinner, points us ahead to the One who can get us out of the situation. Adam is described at the end of verse 14 as ‘a type of the one who was to come.’ (A type being not the same thing but something like it).
4. Staying with that idea of ‘being not the same thing but something like it’ the free gift of God is not like the wrong-doing of humankind. God offers not condemnation for sin, but forgiveness through grace.
Let’s hear William Barclay on this (Commentary on Romans P81).
“Paul’s triumphant argument is that, as mankind was solid with Adam and was therefore condemned to death, so mankind is solid with Christ and is therefore acquitted to life. Even although the law has come and made sin much more terrible, the grace of Christ overcomes the condemnation which the law must bring”
Such is the argument that concludes our final verses:
17 If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. 18 Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.
20 But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification1 leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
As always I’m indebted to Eugene Peterson’s transliteration “The Message” for shedding further light on this passage. Here is how he puts Romans 5:18-19
“Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.”
And of course by ‘that one man who got it right’ Paul means Jesus Christ.
So in this chapter we see the results of receiving the gospel by placing our faith in the gospel message.
It firstly offers us peace. Peace in changing circumstances. That means that whatever we go though we can know that God is with us, not against us!
It secondly offers us forgiveness. The cycle of sin and death from Adam onward is one that has involved all humankind. In that sense we are all ‘solid’ with Adam in that we have all lost our innocence and are far from paradise. But the coming of another ‘One’… the Christ, the Messiah who came ‘at the right time’ who died and was raised again from the dead has broken that cycle of sin and death. His strength triumphs over our weakness.
One of the Easter hymns in our blue hymnbook “Christ is Risen, Christ is living” (109 second verse) expresses the latter half of Romans 5 in this way and serves as an adequate conclusion to our study.
“If the Lord had never risen,
We'd have nothing to believe.
But His promise can be trusted:
"You will live, because I live."
As we share the death of Adam,
So in Christ we live again.
Death has lost its sting and terror.
Christ the Lord has come to reign.”
(Text from Cantico Nuevo, , Translation by Fred Kaan copyright © 1974 by Hope Publishing Company)