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Notes on Romans 5

This is the classic expression, and progression, of the path to Christian maturity. Salvation begins, develops , and culminates with faith in Jesus Christ. When we are saved, we enter into a new relationship with God, going from alienation to reconciliation, from enmity to friendship, and from the rank of strangers to son-ship. It is that relationship that results in peace, in that sense of inward ease and contentment that comes from being where we are meant to be, in fellowship with our Creator. Everything that we have is by God's grace alone, and as we grow in that grace, in his favor, he bestows on us gifts that we never before could receive. We develop the capacity to endure whatever life sends our way, because we know God is with us in whatever happens. With each succeeding trial of our faith, we learn to trust God more and more, and to wait on his intervention. With a record of experience in fellowship with Christ, provision in our hours of need, and security in the midst of chaos, our confidence in the promised hope of eternal life grows strong and steady. That's the ideal; many, if not most, Christians never attain to it, because we bail at the first sign of trouble, the first threat to our snug position in our comfort zone. Content to go through life in the bare knowledge we're saved, we never venture out in to uncharted waters, never take risks. Instead of shedding the love of God abroad to others, we bury it somewhere out of sight, or take it out on Sunday to admire its place on a dusty shelf. What we lose cannot be measured, and the saddest witness of any Christian's life is that he or she remembers the day of salvation, but has nothing else to point to afterward.

Christ need not have died -- if we could count on our goodness to merit God's favor. Sin brought death into the world, because separation from God also results in death. His power sustains us, and gives us life, so when we rejected him, in Adam, we rejected the life-sustaining power. Until his fall, Adam was the perfect man, without sin. The only One who could restore life to the world also had be a perfect man, to restore the innocence that was lost in the Fall. So much of the record of scripture is a record of contrasts, between life and death, between sin and obedience, between the law and grace. Both Adam's death and that of Christ were caused by sin, but the one was from guilt, while the second was from willing self-sacrifice. Our minds try to wrap around the concept of divine justice, but real understanding remains out of our grasp. All we know is that, in God's economy, sin equates to death, and the only possible payment for it is life. Under the sacrificial system, the life offered was that of innocent animals, as a poor substitute for the lives of the people of Israel. A sinful life, though, did not pay the price, so no human being could hope to make the payment. All of us are sinners by nature. The only sinless sacrifice God could offer was himself, in the form of his incarnate Son. So, although it was man's sin that incurred the penalty of death, it was God's grace that paid the penalty.

Why that is so, we may not understand fully this side of glory, but we don't really have to. All that is required of us is to accept what has been done, and to marvel at the astounding love of a God who allowed us to incur a debt we could never pay, then proceeded to pay it himself. That was the lesson he tried to teach the people of Israel, in a picture, by telling them to set every fiftieth year, the year of Jubilee, to cancel all debts. It is doubtful they ever ready put the custom into practice, and we certainly would never do so in our modern debt-driven society. There is an interesting analogy in the fact that so much of our economy is based on paying for what we cannot afford with money we do not yet have. The analogy comes home with bankruptcy, when we either cannot or will not fulfill our promise to pay. We are all, as human beings, morally bankrupt. We start off in life encumbered by a debt we did not incur, much as new workers now have to inherit our massive national debt. Added on top of that is the burden of sins we commit from that point forward, already condemned by the fact that we don't have the currency, a guiltless life, to repay the debt.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is, has been, and always will be, that the debt has been written off, canceled, marked "paid in full". We were bond slaves, chained by sin from our very birth. Christ not only paid our debt, he redeemed us from slavery. He is our Savior not just because he paid our sin debt, but because he saved us out of bondage. He not only balanced our account, he made a deposit sufficient to cancel all our remaining debts, even before we incur them. There is only one requirement, yet this is just what keeps most men from deliverance and freedom. We are required to exercise the one, great, God-like power we all have: the power to choose. That's all; if we choose Christ, the reward is life, and not just for a few brief decades, but for all the endless eons of eternity. If we make no choice, or if we deliberately reject him, the result is still the same; we remain dead in our sins, captive to it, and the consequence is an everlasting death. Sin not only results from our separation from God; it causes that separation, and perpetuates it. Christ is our judge, yes, but the verdict is decided long before we stand before the throne. We are either guilty or not guilty by the record of our lives, when we breathe our last breath in this flesh. No one can choose for us; each of us is, literally, the master of his or her eternal destiny. That is the gift, or the curse, God bestowed on us at Calvary; a gift if we choose Christ, a curse if we do not.