Last week, I was questioned on this key passage in the book of Romans. My answers in person, as usual, were not quite up to par. I did remember to qualify my remarks with the right to extend and amend, the right I will exercise now.
Romans 5:1-5 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
This section of Paul’s epistle is, in essence, the conclusion of the section on justification that started in the second half of chapter 3. It is important to remember in Paul’s letters, particularly Romans, that he is delivering a long and carefully constructed argument. By virtue of the fact that the first word of this section is “therefore,” we know that something important has come before. Therefore, let’s discuss what has come before prior to attempting to unpack these verses.
In Romans, Paul starts with a key doctrinal point. All men are at enmity with God. The heart is a dark cesspool of evil that can lead to no good. No man seeks God, no not even one. The sum total value of our efforts to seek God is failure and our deserved death. Then, starting with Romans 3:21, Paul explains that there is another pathway to righteousness before God, apart from works, that comes from God as a gift. In Chapter 4, Paul explains the covenant of Abraham and how it applies both to Gentiles as well as Jews. So, when Paul comes to Chapter 5, he has already laid a ton of doctrine on the table that must be assumed when you come to the word “therefore.”
Instead of the constant and usual impulse to look for “practical application for daily living right now” in Romans, try to put that aside for a while. Paul will come back to it in chapter 12. The first 11 chapters of Romans need to be considered from an Eschatological perspective. What does this mean? We need to view this argument in terms of redemptive history. These arguments are concerned with a much larger topic than how we live day to day. Paul is talking about Judgment Day, that day when each one of us will stand before God and make an account of ourselves in a bid for Salvation, eternal union with God and everlasting Joy and Peace with God. This is the focus. Let go of the here and now for a while and focus on the big picture.
On Judgment Day we face a problem. We are all enemies of God. There is no internal means of righteousness that will satisfy God’s Holiness and expectation for a judgment that is less than death. This is the Great Court Room and we are all on trial. The charge is sin and we are all guilty. The standard for a not guilty verdict is perfection, Matthew 5:48, and we all fall short of the standard. In this courtroom, the Judge has mercy upon us, because for believers, the Son is also our Mediator and Advocate. Think about what those words mean in a legal sense. Our courtroom judge is also our Covenant Attorney. But then, this is where it gets absolutely incredible, for the believer, our sin is imputed to Jesus and His perfect righteousness is imputed to us. This is sometimes known as the Great Exchange. So now, there we believers stand, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, awaiting the judgment of God. Here comes the best part. God, who is infinitely Holy and infinitely Just, can now render a Not Guilty verdict for us believers without violation of either His Holiness or His Justice. That is a very important point. God’s justice must be satisfied. But it is better than that. From Romans 3:25 we believers see that not only are we Not Guilty, but our right relationship with God is restored. God is propitiated by the exchange; His wrath is not only turned away, but we believers are granted the infinite rewards of Justification, Sanctification and Glorification.
Now, let us define those three words and then place them chronologically in our redemptive historical timeline. First, Justification is a declaration of our righteousness. It occurs instantaneously, as we are declared righteous. The action which justified us was the life, death and resurrection of Christ 2000 years ago. We become Covenant members with Christ at Baptism. If the Holy Spirit gives us the gift of true faith, we will not only get the benefits of the Covenant in this present age, but we will also receive the eternal rewards in the Age to Come. The blessings and curses that attend to Covenants are part of all covenants in the Bible. I will discuss these in the next post. Sanctification is both instantaneous and a process. As long as we are alive, as long as we have this present body in this present evil age, we are IN ADAM, therefore, we remain in sin. Even though by Baptism we are declared to be new creatures in Christ, our bodies are of this world, of this present evil age. Read Romans 7 and see how Paul describes his struggle in sin after his transformation because his body is still in Adam. Sanctification is the process of our moving towards the perfection that we will require on the Last Day. This is a very difficult concept, but let me try to explain this better. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus were completely sufficient both for our justification and our sanctification. But our bodies are still in sin, so we struggle while we remain in this world with sin. There are means of Grace through which we receive renewal throughout our lives to assist us in our Sanctification. The Holy Spirit provides this grace through two means: the Word and the Sacraments. Therefore, and notice this carefully because it is vitally important, we have nothing to do with either our justification or our sanctification. The means of both are external to us. God provides both. When we go to church, we repent, we receive absolution, we hear the Word read and preached, we participate in the Sacrament of Communion, and we are sent out into the world again to continue in the Great Commission. That is Christian Living. That is God’s purpose for us. That is God’s plan for us. That was all provided for us by God for God’s chosen people. It is all independent of us and our meager efforts. There are no works in this formula for either justification or sanctification. That is what Paul is writing about in Chapters 3-5 for justification and 6-8 for sanctification. We’ll talk about the fruits of the Spirit another time, because I don’t want to muddy the water just yet. This last bit IS the Gospel according to Paul.
Now Glorification occurs on the Last Day. That is when we become finished beings. Our renewed souls are reunited with our resurrection bodies as complete, restored, redeemed and perfect creatures of God. We will never be glorified until after our death or the second Coming of Christ, whichever comes first. As Christ passed through death on our behalf to rid the world of sin, so must we also pass through death to inherit His eternal kingdom. This one is pretty simple.
OK, now we can come back to Romans 5. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. What Paul is saying here is that because we have been given this faith that justifies, and we have been transformed in our hearts (but not in our bodies yet), we are at Peace with God. We were at war with God, but now our sin has been declared gone and we are declared righteous before God through our faith. Let me say this again. Paul spends 3 chapters explaining that we were at enmity with God. Read the rest of Chapter 5. While we were still at enmity with God, He declared us righteous and justified us with by clothing us with a righteousness external to us and restored us to right standing with Him through the propitiation provided by the blood of Jesus. Now, by the same declaration, we are at Peace with God. This is a declaration of our status with God. We may not feel like we are at peace with God, but this declaration is external to us. This declaration of Peace is a part of the Gospel; it is news. Think about the benediction that we receive at the end of our service on Sunday. Go in Peace to Love and Serve the Lord. This is NOT an imperative; this is a declaration of our condition as believers in Christ. We are now at Peace with God. He has declared it thus.
Now, here we come to verses 3-5. Not only are we at peace with God now, but because of this, we can now rejoice in this life EVEN THROUGH OUR SUFFERING. We can rejoice because we have been declared at Peace with God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. That string of conditions between suffering and hope are not meant as a checklist for our lives. That is also a declaration of fact. Because we are now at Peace with God, we can rejoice in our suffering, because suffering does produce endurance, and endurance does produce character, and character does produce hope. And very importantly, our hope as believers does not put us to shame, because our hope has been given to us by the Holy Spirit in the form of our faith in the work of Jesus on the Cross and its efficacy for us for our Salvation. Because of the knowledge that we are now at Peace with God, where before we were His enemies, by no doing of our own, we can now be at peace in this present age, even through our sufferings.
That is what the reformers believed that Paul was saying in Romans 1-5. I hope that this fairly lengthy explanation satisfies the enquiry that was put forth to me on the subject. As always with Paul, when the word “therefore” appears in a verse, we must understand the antecedent before we can understand the verse.
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