“Therefore,” says Paul, “since we have been justified by faith”—and with that, he tells us what the next four chapters are going to be about. He has firmly established that every human being, no matter who or what they are, begins life alienated from God; that this alienation is a fatal spiritual problem which human effort cannot overcome, and doesn’t particularly want to; that this includes the Jewish law, which shows us the problem but is unable to fix it; that God overcame this problem through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and that as a result, by faith in Jesus Christ—and Christ alone—we have been made right with God, we have been justified by his grace, and we have been given new life. All that being true, and profoundly important, it raises the question: how does this affect how we live? It’s to that question that Paul now turns.
The great theme in this great section is hope, and specifically the hope of participating in the glory of God through Christ; and because Paul understands that the hope of the people of God is rooted in the work of God as the one who delivers his people, Paul intends to anchor that hope in the Exodus, God’s great deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Underlying this is the idea, which we see explicitly in various other places in the New Testament, that Jesus came to lead a new Exodus, forming a new people for his name by delivering them from a far greater bondage—to the power of sin and death. Paul doesn’t say this here in so many words, but he will lay it out in chapters 6-8 by retelling the Exodus story theologically in terms of the life of the church in Christ.
Before he can do that, however, he has to establish that the hope of Israel and the promises of God to his people now apply more broadly than just ethnic Israel, and not simply or automatically on the basis of being a Jew, or even a law-abiding Jew. That’s the purpose of chapter 5, which lays out the justification for that shift.
The core of this first part of chapter 5 is verses 6-8: Christ died on our behalf, as our representative and our substitute, while we were still sinners. This had nothing to do with us being good enough for anything, because we weren’t; and what he did is nothing we can compare to anything any other human being has ever done. Christ didn’t die for us because we were righteous—but who ever has died for someone just because that person was righteous?
If you saw someone in trouble, would the fact that you know they were a moral person make you decide to give your life to save them? If it’s someone who has personally done you good, then you might be moved to die in order to save their life; but unless you love them greatly, maybe you wouldn’t be. But Jesus went far, far beyond that, dying for us when we were not his friends but his enemies—why? Because God loves each and every one of us greatly, more than we will ever fully comprehend.
And because Jesus died for us, the offense of our sin has been removed from us and we have been reconciled to God. We are no longer alienated from him, we are no longer estranged from him, and in Christ we now stand guiltless in his presence; his wrath against sin is no longer directed toward us, and we no longer see God as our enemy, because we have received his love and our hearts are being healed. Our salvation is assured, because there is absolutely nothing left standing to prevent it.
Therefore, through Jesus, we have peace with God. The Greek word here is eirēnē, which is actually where we get the name “Irene”; underlying it is the Hebrew word shalōm, and everything the Old Testament means by that word. This doesn’t just mean that we don’t fight with God, or that things are calm; this isn’t the sort of reconciliation that just means you go back to exchanging the occasional birthday card or e-mail, and smile politely if you happen to see each other at a family gathering.
Rather, as you may remember if you were here last December, the idea here is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will; and second, as a result, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety. This in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalōm isn’t just a truce with God, or even a peace treaty, it’s full-out allegiance; it’s a life lived on the same page with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life which Jesus gives to those who believe in him.
And because of this, we have the hope of the glory of God, because in Jesus he has delivered his people—us—from slavery, and the promises of God are now for us; as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1, in the passage from which we took last week’s call to worship, all the promises of God find their “Yes!” in Jesus Christ. Through Jesus we have come to have “access into this grace in which we stand,” and by which we stand. We cannot put ourselves in a state of grace; we were born under law, and left to our own strength we will die under the law, but Jesus has brought us out from under the law into a new life in which grace reigns. Grace is the ground on which we stand in the presence of God, and it is the power by which we are able to stand, and to keep standing; it is only by grace that we live, and indeed only by grace that we are not crushed.
This is reason for us to rejoice, not only in good times but even in times of suffering—Paul has no rose-colored glasses here, he doesn’t imagine that we should somehow be exempt from the pains of this world. Rather, he says that we have been given so great a hope, we even have reason to rejoice because of our suffering. He doesn’t restrict this to suffering caused directly by our faith, either; as the NT scholar Douglas Moo puts it,
all the evil that the Christian experiences reflects the conflict between “this age,” dominated by Satan, and “the age to come,” to which the Christian has been transferred by faith. All suffering betrays the presence of the enemy and involves attacks on our relationship to Christ. If met with doubt in God’s goodness and promise, or bitterness toward others, or despair and even resignation, these sufferings can bring spiritual defeat to the believer. But if met with the attitude of “confidence and rejoicing” that Paul encourages here, these sufferings will produce . . . valuable spiritual qualities.
Suffering, Paul tells us, functions as spiritual exercise. I’ve been so busy lately, and so tired so much of the time, that I haven’t rowed much at all. I’m feeling it in my back, too. But for all that I need it if I’m going to stay healthy and function at my best, it’s easy for me to make excuses to myself not to row, because there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to do it. I don’t like being sweaty, and that a part of me still doesn’t like the pain that comes with it. Some of you I know are saying, “But it’s a good hurt,” and that’s true—but it was a hard concept for me to learn.
Suffering, Paul says, is like that, because without suffering we never learn to endure—we never learn that we can endure; and we need endurance, we need stick-to-itive-ness, if we’re going to keep the faith in this life, because life just keeps going and going and going. It’s only by sticking to it, by continuing to hang on and follow Jesus through all the ups and downs and around all the curves, that we grow in faith and develop a proven character; and if we do, we find along the way that our hope has grown and strengthened, because we’ve been exercising it.
It isn’t when we feel no need for hope because everything’s going fine that hope grows, and it isn’t when the road ahead seems obvious and easy that we need to live by faith—it’s when we hurt and we struggle and we need to hold on to faith that God is with us and hope in him to hang on to us and bring us through, and when we see that he is faithful, that we see that “hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”