(Genesis 25:19-26, Malachi 1:1-5; Romans 8:38-9:13)

When I was laying out this sermon series last January, I was pleased to see the conclusion of Romans 8 landing on the last Sunday before my vacation. One of the signs I look for in planning the year’s messages is how everything fits together, and to have the timing fall into place like that helped confirm that I was on the right track. That’s partly because I didn’t want a three-week gap falling in the middle of Romans 8—or worse, Romans 9—but it’s also because a break right between those two chapters is entirely appropriate. I won’t say taking three weeks between them is necessarily best, but it’s entirely appropriate—because that break is right there in the text.

That’s why I included the last two verses of chapter 8 in our reading this morning, to underscore this fact. Chapter 8 ends with this ringing declaration of our victory in Christ, a great rocketing leap of praise for our confident hope and faith in him—but what goes up must come down, and Paul comes down like Evel Knievel in the Snake River Canyon, because everything he’s said in chapter 8 brings him back to the central problem he’s grappling with in this letter: what about the Jews?

In chapter 2, he lays out the case from Scripture that they deserve God’s judgment just as much as the Gentiles, and are just as dependent on the grace of God. In chapter 5, he establishes that the promises of God to his people apply in Christ beyond the Jews to the Gentiles. In chapter 7, he confronts the problem of the Law and its place in God’s saving work. But that still leaves the biggest problem of all: if Jews aren’t guaranteed salvation for being Jews—if God can reject them and give their place in his kingdom to someone else—then does that mean God has gone back on his promises to them?

It’s a vast question with broad implications for our understanding of the church—and one in which all the easy answers are wrong. Unfortunately, those easy answers were driving considerable conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome, and no doubt elsewhere in the first-century church, which we’ve seen was Paul’s great practical concern in writing this letter. As such, he’s going to answer it at great length and with great care, across three chapters of this book; and he’s going to do so in the full understanding that he really isn’t the first to grapple with this question.

If Paul in the first eight chapters has told the story of our salvation in Christ in terms of the salvation history of Israel, now he gets to the unhappy part. Now he gets to the exile, and he wrestles with the same basic issue as Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Malachi: if God brings down disaster on his people and drives them away for their unfaithfulness, does that mean the end of his promises? Does it mean he’s changed his mind and abandoned them? Or is there, somehow, hope that they will be restored—and if so, how? The only real difference between Paul in his day and the prophets in their day is that he knows the full story of Jesus, while they only had bits and pieces; and he leans on them heavily, especially Isaiah, in these three chapters.

You see, as H. L. Mencken once observed, “For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.” Or in this case, two. One is to say, well, Jews are still saved just by being Jews and doing their best to keep the Law, just the way they thought—Christ is only for the Gentiles; but if that’s the case, why did he bother going to the Jews? And why did the Jews even need Messiah? Paul has pretty well debunked that idea over the course of this letter, and his conviction that his fellow Jews can only find salvation in Christ—and thus are reaping damnation in rejecting him—is clear in the agony he expresses in verses 1-3. Like Moses in Exodus 32, he expresses the wish that God might even condemn him, if only it would save his people.

Of course, that isn’t possible; Jesus has already died for them, and there’s nothing Paul’s sacrifice could do that Jesus didn’t. But that he even expresses the thought shows the depths of his love and concern for his people, and his grief that they have rejected their God. Clearly, the one simple answer will not stand. At the same time, though, Paul also rejects the other one, which is that the church has simply replaced Israel—the promises have been transferred, the Jews are out in the cold, and that’s that. Obviously, Paul doesn’t want to believe that, due to his desire that his people be saved; but more significantly, he recognizes that to draw this conclusion is to make God a liar who cannot be trusted to do as he says. The message of Christ is only good news if God is faithful to keep his word, and so Paul’s task is to show that the gospel is not the cancellation of God’s promises to Israel, but their fulfillment.

Now, the root assumption of Paul’s Jewish opponents is that God’s choice of Israel as his people obliged him to save every individual Israelite, as long as they didn’t flat-out reject him; as we talked about some weeks ago, it was the idea that their special status as the people of God exempted them from his judgment. Chapter 2 attacks this assumption by showing from Scripture that all people are under judgment for sin, Jews and Gentiles alike. Here, he counters it from a different direction, pointing out that God’s choice of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never meant that mere physical descent from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was enough to guarantee salvation: God chose Isaac and rejected Ishmael, and he chose Jacob and rejected Esau. Just because someone belongs to the nation of Israel doesn’t mean they belong to God’s people Israel.

God has chosen his people, and we don’t get to determine or define the basis on which he makes his choice. There is absolutely nothing given to us to say that this person must be saved, or that person cannot be saved; there are no markers by which we can predict or decide the eternal fate of anyone. More, there is nothing that we can say controls or obligates God to do anything, and nothing that we can say must be the basis for his choice. His children are the children of the promise, not of any human effort or any human process, and he gives his promise to whomever he will.

At this point you might be thinking, “What about faith?” Certainly Paul argues quite strongly, earlier in Romans, that we are justified by faith alone; doesn’t that make our faith the basis of his choice? No. Even faith, even the desire for faith, is impossible for us apart from the saving work of God in our lives; faith is his gift to us as much as anything else. As St. Augustine put it, “God does not choose us because we believe, but that we may believe.” It all begins with God; it has to, because we were utterly powerless even to try to save ourselves—our salvation had to be his work from first to last.

The standard objection here is that this trivializes human faith and the human response to God, and makes us nothing more than puppets; and there are teachers in the church who have gone that way. I don’t believe it does, though. Paul tells us that we cannot insist on any basis for God’s choice of his people outside of God himself—whether descent from Abraham or our decision to pray the sinner’s prayer—but that doesn’t mean that God’s choice is random or capricious; that we cannot know the reasons for his choice doesn’t mean he doesn’t have reasons. It simply means we cannot know the mind of God, which isn’t really news. It means that here we stand at the edge of what we can comprehend, looking into the mystery of the grace of God.

Let me give you an illustration which I’ve found helpful over the years. I’ve spent a fair bit of time hanging around writers, and one thing I’ve found to be true of those who write fiction is that their characters are real people to them, with minds of their own. My friends created those characters, but they aren’t just puppets to be manipulated around the stage. They act out their own intentions according to their natures, sometimes doing things that their author didn’t expect, creating the story as they do so. And yet, it’s the mind and hands of the author that produce the story, and the author is in control. So in some sense, you see, everything that happens in the story is the product of two wills, of the author and the character; and authors will talk about their books that way, taking credit in one breath for writing a line of dialogue, but in the next crediting the character’s wit.

This is hard for us to understand; but I think it shows intuitively how it’s possible for our decisions to be the result both of our will and of God’s will. God is outside the story of creation, while we are within it. From within, we are free agents, willing our own actions; from without, he is the author, writing every scene as he chooses. And after all, as free agents we are acting out our characters—and he is the one who created our characters. There’s no contradiction here, it’s just a matter of which side you’re looking at; and it’s important that we emphasize both sides—both that our response to God in faith and our decision to follow him is absolutely crucial and deeply meaningful, and that our salvation is God’s work first to last, entirely his free gift to us.

What this all comes back to is the point Paul is determined to defend: our salvation rests, not on ourselves, not on our own efforts or abilities, not on where we were born or who our family is or what nation or race or tribe we belong to, but only and entirely on the infinite power and absolute faithfulness of God.

(Psalm 44:20-26; Romans 8:31-39)

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:1-5)

“The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 5:20-21)

“Sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.” (Romans 6:14)

“Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:22-23)

“While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our bodies to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” (Romans 7:5-6)

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, be-cause through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2)

“We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he called; those he called, he justified; those he justified, he glorified.” (Romans 8:28-30)

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? God is for us. He has not abandoned us to our sin, he has not abandoned us to our enemies, he has not abandoned us to our failures, he has not abandoned us to those who would condemn us—he has given us his Son, Jesus Christ, and in Jesus he has given us new life. Whoever else may abandon us, whoever else may give up on us, whoever else may turn on us, God says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” God is for us; who can possibly be against us?

Of course, this doesn’t mean people won’t try. They try every day. But God is for us—God who is at work in everything for the good of his children. People may try to be against us, but they can’t outsmart God; in the end we will say with Joseph, “You meant this for evil, but God intended it for good.” In the end, even our enemies will be used for our blessing and growth.

People will still accuse us of things—sometimes even dreadful things. Some of them will probably be true, since we know we do still sin. Others won’t be, and those accusations will come precisely because we’re not guilty of anything. The more we follow Christ, the more we will make some folks uncomfortable, and some of them will deal with their discomfort by opening fire on us. One of the best ways to do that is by making an accusation, because people who hear an accusation will tend to start off assuming it must be true; it puts us in a bad light with our community whether it’s the least bit fair or not. Paul knew this well for the ridiculous array of charges that were hurled at him over the years. And yet he says, “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?” Why? “It is God who justifies; who is to condemn?” Remember, he says, who holds justice in his hand; whatever this world may say, the only verdict that ultimately matters is God’s, and it is God who has declared you innocent in Christ.

Indeed, Jesus is standing right there at the Father’s right hand as our great high priest, bringing our prayers to the Father and interceding on our behalf; the one who died for us and rose again for us is our advocate. Anyone who wanted to turn the Father against us would have to turn Jesus against us—and can anyone or anything make him stop loving us? No, says Paul. We suffer, but it doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t love us. Just look at Paul’s own example. In his list in verse 35, he had suffered every one of those things except execution, and he’d already faced the threat of that; he could testify from his own experience that not one of those things had in any way served to separate him from Christ. If anything, they drove him closer to the Lord.

It isn’t enough to say that God will get us through tough times; it isn’t enough to say that he will help us endure trials or opposition or oppression. No, not only are trouble and hardship, persecution and danger and all manner of suffering unable to separate us from the love of Christ, we don’t merely hang on through adversities, we prevail over them. Indeed, it isn’t even enough to say we conquer them, for that doesn’t go far enough—in Christ we are more than conquerors, because God doesn’t just leave the adversities we face in life as defeated bad things in our past. Rather, he takes our trials and sufferings and he uses them to bless us and grow us, turning them to our good. From those black roots, he grows beautiful flowers.

To this, there are no exceptions. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that could ever even conceivably cut us off from the love of God, which he expressed in giving his Son Jesus Christ for us so that he might redeem us and call us his children. There is nothing that could ever undo what God has done for us in Christ, and nothing that could ever make him even think about changing his mind about that. Nothing in our existence—nothing in life, and not even death. Nothing in the spiritual realm—not angels, and not devils. Nothing in time—nothing we’re doing now, nothing anyone else is doing, and nothing we or anyone else will ever do. No powers of any sort—spiritual, political, cultural, military, religious, judicial, or any other kind you might want to name. Nothing in all creation, no matter how high or how low you want to go—even if you could go all the way to Heaven or Hell. Not anything, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, can separate you or me or any one of God’s people from his love.

God loves us in Christ. He loves us as we are in Christ, and as we will one day fully be, and nothing wrong with us now can change that. He loves us in the work of Christ—he shows his love for us in that while we were still completely ruined, sinners unable even to want to repent, Jesus died for us. God loves the world in this way: he gave his Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish—absolutely not—but will, for certain, have eternal life. Nothing you can do, nothing you will ever do, can change that, undo that, or modify that in any way, and neither can anything the Devil or anybody else can do. That’s how big God’s love is, that’s how big his grace is—big enough to swallow anything else and never change a bit. Our hope is in Christ alone, and that means our hope is absolutely certain, because he is absolutely faithful. This is the promise of the gospel for you, this day and every day, now and forevermore. Amen.

(Genesis 3:17-19, Isaiah 43:16-21; Romans 8:18-30)

In the wilderness. In this between. As Christians we live in tension, for we are still in this world, but we do not belong here. We have given our allegiance, our obedience, our whole lives to a king we have never seen and cannot see; we have become part of a reality that is at odds with the reality of the world we see. We are surrounded by the present, but we belong to the future; we are out of phase with time and this world.

And in that, we suffer. We suffer because this world suffers, because evil and cruelty run like a thin red line through every human heart, snarling our communities and cutting across our lives. There are none innocent and none who are not victims, none who are not oppressors and none who do not bleed; and if we follow Christ we suffer more, and will suffer more, because he calls us to stand down all our worldly defenses and lay down all our worldly weapons. We are to resist the world, but we do not fight it on its terms; and sometimes that means we get hit hard.

If we focus on our sufferings and our trials, if we set our minds and our hearts on the things of this world, then we will be miserable; we’ll see everything in life through the lens of our anxiety, pain, and disappointment. If our hope is for this life and the rewards of this world, then our souls will always be in pawn to our circumstances, our lives driven by things outside our control. Our only paths to happiness will be to try to avoid suffering and conflict and any trials that might be too great for us, or else to attempt to dominate and control everyone around us in an effort to squash any threats before they get too close; but either way, we end up spending all our energy in ultimately fruitless efforts to prevent bad things from happening, and thus unable to pursue what is good.

As Christians, while we’re called to live in the present, we are not to live for the present. Our lives have a goal and a purpose which goes beyond this time, and indeed beyond this life altogether; we are called to live toward the future, in the light of the future, and to see all our circumstances—struggles and opportunities, pleasures and sufferings alike—in that light. Our sorrows, our groanings and our pains are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us, which is already ours in Christ Jesus; they are temporary, they will end, but his glory is eternal for he is eternal.

For now, our pains and struggles serve to remind us that we are not who we were created to be; and as we see the groaning of the natural world around us, both in the violence we do to it and in the violence it does to itself—the weather we’ve been having lately is an excellent example of that—we see clearly that the world as a whole is not how it ought to be. The frustration and pain of the created world, and the frustration and pain we experience as part of this world—if we face them honestly—drive us to recognize that we need a better hope than the election of another politician, even one with really cool posters, or the passage of another bill. We need a hope that goes beyond what we can see; we need more than to be fixed up a bit, we need to be made new.

The challenge is that hope doesn’t make things easier. Indeed, knowing that we have this hope, having the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts, drives us to groan, because we have the first fruits of his work, and we long for the whole harvest, for the fulfillment and the full experience of our salvation; what we have already makes us yearn for what we have not yet known, and it increases our frustration at how short of that we fall, again and again. We hope for what we do not see, and this is hard, but this is also what makes our hope worthwhile; for as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, what is seen is passing away, it will end in dust and ash and a puff of smoke, but what we cannot see is eternal. Thus we know that our hope is worthwhile, and thus we are able to hold on and not lose heart.

To be sure, in our own strength it would be too much for us to hold on, no matter our motivation; but we aren’t left to do anything in our own strength, for the Spirit of God comes to our aid and gives us strength in our weakness. And note what strength Paul has in mind: “for we don’t know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit prays for us, even though we cannot hear his prayers.”

If we would live in the hope of God and the power of the Spirit, we must live in prayer and by prayer, so that the eyes of our heart can be opened to see what the eyes of the flesh cannot see; but this leaves us wondering what to pray. Worse, it leaves us wondering: if we pray wrong, does that mean we’ll miss out? Does our prayer depend on us being smart enough to figure out ahead of time what God’s thinking?

If that were so, it would pitch us right back into living by law, and of a particularly sadistic sort—for God to answer our prayers, we would first have to read his mind; but that isn’t how it works, because we do not pray on our own: the Spirit of God prays with us, and on our behalf. However uncertain our prayers may be, however prone we may be to pray for the wrong thing, however imperfect our understanding and our knowledge of God’s will, the Holy Spirit is always praying too, with us and for us, and always in perfect accord with the will of the Father.

This is good news; but it might not always seem like good news. Doesn’t that mean that the Spirit’s prayers for us will sometimes contradict our prayers? Very likely, yes; but honestly, that’s part of the blessing. I appreciate Luther’s take on this: “It is not a bad but a very good sign if the opposite of what we pray for appears to happen. Just as it is not a good sign if our prayers result in the fulfillment of all we ask for. This is so because the counsel and will of God far excel our counsel and will.” He’s exaggerating—Luther did that every once in a while—but he’s doing it to make a point: we can trust what God is doing even when he gives us the opposite of what we want, because he knows infinitely better than we do what is best for us.

Thus we have this ringing declaration in verse 28: those whom God has called as his own, to his purpose—which is to say, those who love him—have the assurance that in everything that happens, God is at work for our good. When he gives us when we ask for, or when he doesn’t, God is at work for our good. In joyful days, in times of great success, in seasons of failure and pain and trial, God is at work for our good. Even in our greatest sins—the sins from which he does not simply deliver us, but which he leaves as struggles in our lives—even there, God is at work for our good. That doesn’t mean it’s good if we sin—should we continue to sin that grace may abound? Not on your life!—but it does mean that not even our sins defeat God’s work in us. Of course, as Douglas Moo put it, “many things we suffer will contribute to our ‘good’ only by refining our faith and strengthening our hope.” Even so, we will be glad of all of it in the end.

God’s choice of his people is unstoppable, and it will end inevitably in glory. Some would take the word “foreknew” in verse 29 and argue that this just means God foresaw those who would choose to love him, and thus that everything that follows is his response to our action; but that doesn’t work—this word is much stronger than that. God knew us, not just what we would do, from before the beginning of time—he knew us, and he chose us, and he predestined us to be saved, to be transformed, to be made like Christ and to share in his glory.

And the rest follows like an avalanche: those whom he predestined, he called, and those whom he called, he justified, and those whom he justified, he glorified. Period. It is already done, it is all already done. God has acted, and that’s all there is to it; no one can stop his work, nothing can interrupt it—his plan is in motion, and its success is inevitable. Suffering along the way? Yes. Sorrow and grief? To be sure. Failure? We know it all too well. But are any of them permanent, any of them final? No. God allows them in his time and works through them in our lives for our growth; they’re growing pains, nothing more. We are in the wilderness, but this is not our final destination; we don’t make a home here, we look forward to the home that lies ahead. In Christ, we have the sure and certain hope of glory waiting for us, just over Jordan. The Holy Spirit is leading us there, and the Father is standing with open arms. Just keep your eyes on him and your feet on the road; he’s faithful—you’ll get there.

(Ezekiel 36:24-28; Romans 8:1-17)

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Therefore. You may have heard, as I have many times, that when you see a “therefore” in the Bible you need to look and see what it’s there for. So you look up the page just a little, and you see . . . what? “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death! . . . I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” So, therefore there is no condemnation? That can’t be right.

Of course, you might be objecting that I skipped something, and so I did: Paul’s exclamation, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” But you know, that’s just sort of floating loose at the end of chapter 7—by itself, it doesn’t tell us how all this is supposed to fit together. It seems clear that his exclamation comes as an answer of sorts to his question in verse 24—Jesus Christ will deliver us from this body of death, and has delivered us—but then he’s right back into the negative: “I serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (And no, contra the NIV, this is not “sinful nature”; Paul is talking about what we do with our bodies—how we actually act, vs. how we think we ought to act.) So what do we make of this?

Well, in the first place, look back further, to 7:6: “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Then look at the language Paul uses in chapter 8—and again, drop “sinful nature” out of the NIV and read “flesh.” “Flesh” here doesn’t refer to some nature within us; it means the life and the power of the old age, of our blighted, sin-twisted world, of which we as physical beings are very much a part. Before we’re saved, that’s the only frame of reference we have, and so everything in us is under the power of sin and controlled by the desires of the flesh. Even if we want to do what is good and right, we are only able to understand that in this world’s terms. The law can’t bring salvation because it’s powerless to change that: it can’t change the hearts of people who were born in sin, nor can it change their eyes and mindset to see themselves and this world differently. It can’t get people outside the flesh.

Now, when Paul talks about this in chapter 7, he sets the flesh in opposition to the mind or the inner being; but in chapter 8, he reaches back to 7:6 to introduce someone else into the argument. The mind cannot overcome the flesh, because the mind is set on the flesh, but in Christ it’s no longer just the mind vs. the flesh. Rather, if we are in Christ, we have been given his Holy Spirit, and now it is the Spirit of God versus the flesh; and that’s all different.

The Son of God became human—he became flesh just like us, but not under the power of sin—he lived the life of perfect obedience to God that the law required, and then he stood in our place to take the full condemnation for sin that the law required. In so doing, he stripped sin of its power to control us and condemn us, he gathered us to himself and put his Spirit within us, so that we might see with the eyes of the Holy Spirit, think with minds set on and shaped by the Holy Spirit, and so live in the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus by the work of his Holy Spirit we have been set free from the flesh. We were under the power of sin and the condemnation of the law, we were bound to this world with chains of our own forging, and there was nothing we could do about it; but he delivered us. He led us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, through the water, into the land between. We have not yet arrived at the Promised Land; we have not fully entered into the kingdom of God; but we already belong to it. We are already under his rule, and we are already experiencing his life and his power, even as we struggle with the powers of this world.

Which is to say, we stand in the same place the Israelites stood after Moses led them through the Red Sea: the wilderness. The land between, that separated the land of slavery from the land of promise; the place of testing and challenge, where we have to live by faith and we have to follow God because he’s the only one who knows how he got us here, and he’s the only one who knows how to get us where we’re going. People tend to want to use the law like a spiritual GPS, like it can give us turn-by-turn directions to the Kingdom of Heaven, but it can’t. Even for the Israelites, who received the law from the hand of God on Mt. Sinai, it didn’t give them directions to the Promised Land. They still had to walk by faith, and follow; which is why so many of them were never allowed to enter it, because they wouldn’t do that.

So how do we live in the wilderness? By the leading and the power of the Spirit of God. We learn to live as God wants us to live not by following a set of commands, but by setting our mind on the Spirit, and on the things of the Spirit. In our reading, in the things we watch, in the activities on which we spend our time, do we choose things that fix our thoughts and our desires on Jesus—because the Spirit of God always points us to Jesus—or do we choose things that focus our attention on the world and the desires of the flesh? Do we set aside time for intentional prayer—time to set our minds on the things of the Spirit and turn our hearts to the Lord? Do we make time to read the Bible, not hastily, as a duty, but thoughtfully, listening to the voice of God? These are questions we need to consider, because these are the habits that set our minds on the Spirit, or not.

If we set our minds on the things of the Spirit, the more we do that, the more we see the love and goodness and glory of God, and especially in the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ; and as the historian George Marsden put it, summarizing the great American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, those who see this

will see the beauty of a universe in which unsentimental love triumphs over real evil. They will not be able to view Christ’s love dispassionately but rather will respond to it with their deepest affections. Truly seeing such good they will have no choice but to love it. Glimpsing such love, they will be drawn away from their preoccupations with the gratifications of their most immediate sensations. They will be drawn from their self-centered universes. Seeing the beauty of the redemptive love of Christ is the true center of reality, they will love God and all that he has created.

And in that, we will be motivated to change. God calls us to put to death the sins we practice with our bodies, but not out of a sense of duty, or determination, or fear of punishment—no, out of joy. “By the Spirit,” he says—the Spirit of God who rejoices in the Father and in Jesus Christ the Son, who fills us with the life and love and hope and joy and peace of God, who teaches us to see the desires of the world and the flesh in the light of his goodness and glory. By the Spirit learn to put our sinful habits to death, not grudgingly or regretfully, but joyfully and with anticipation, seeing them not as good things God is making us give up, but as things that are holding us back—that we want to get rid of to make room for something better: the life of God.

(Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Romans 7)

As I told you back at the beginning of this series, I’ve been working through Romans developing the idea that Paul is giving us a theological retelling and reworking of the salvation history of Israel; and as I noted at the time, I was inspired to this by N. T. Wright, who suggested that chapters 6-8 are a theological retelling of the Exodus. One of the reasons I found that idea plausible and appealing is that it gives us a framework in which to understand chapter 7.

Paul isn’t sidetracking himself in this chapter, as some would suggest; rather, this is the culmination of his argument about the Old Testament Law. Jesus’ death and resurrection began the new Exodus, freeing his people from slavery to sin just as God had delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt; but once God leads you out of the land of death and into the wilderness, you have to know how to live in the wilderness—how to follow him, what he wants you to do, what your priorities are supposed to be.

For Israel, that came when God led them to Mount Sinai and made a covenant with them, giving them his law through Moses. The law was God’s gift and blessing to Israel, promising them life if they could only keep it; but Paul is arguing that the law couldn’t actually bring life, and didn’t, because they couldn’t keep it. He’s arguing that salvation never did come through the law, that it can only come through the saving work of Christ—and Christ alone, not even Christ plus law. Indeed, he says, just as in Christ we have died to sin, so in Christ we have died to the law; we still have much to learn from it, but we are no longer under its authority. We have a new way to live.

Paul, then, is confronting the law head-on in this chapter. He begins by making the case that in Christ we have died to the law, and thus been released from it. He illustrates this from marriage: the law of marriage is ended by death. If a man dies and his wife marries someone else, she’s not guilty of adultery, because she’s no longer married; she’s legally free to do so, because death brings the power of law to an end. In the same way, before we were saved, we were bound by the power of the law, but when we were saved, our old lives died; we died in the shackles that anchored us to the wall, and then Christ raised us to life again—in his life—not only outside the shackles, but outside the whole prison. The people who were under the law are dead; we are new people.

Now, in saying this, Paul seems to have equated the law with sin; since God gave the law, that would make God the author of sin, and so Paul is at pains to clarify this. The point is not that the law is sin; it is, rather, that the law served not to reduce sin but to make it worse—something he’s already said in chapter 5—and thus that the law served as an instrument of sin, bringing death even though it pointed the way to life.

We should clarify one thing here before we go on. Paul in this chapter is talking about himself, but not only about himself. Like any Jew of his time, he had a strong sense of corporate identity with all his people and their history—something we see in the Passover ritual, in which participants confess that they were slaves in Egypt and delivered through the power of God; and in the Mishnah, the first great collection of the oral traditions of Judaism, where we find the statement, “In every generation, each Jew should regard himself as though he too were brought out of Egypt.” This is how Paul is looking at the giving of the law on Sinai—describing the experience of Israel as his own. Before the giving of the law, Israel had at least some life; when they received the law, it inspired sin in their hearts, leading to death.

Law inspires sin. It tells us we have to stop doing things we want to do; it gives us new bad ideas of things to do; and it stimulates us to rebellion. St. Augustine in the Confessions tells of stealing pears as a young man, not because he wanted the pears—he and his friends fed them to pigs—but just for the pleasure of stealing them. On a humbler level, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the dinosaur books by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague—there’s How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?, and a bunch of others designed to inspire good behavior in children. This one, How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?, Sara initially refused to have a copy; our kids are all good eaters, and she didn’t want them getting any ideas.

The law is not sin, and the law does not bring death; but the law inspires sin rather than preventing it, and sin brings death. As such, anyone who tries to live by keeping the law—unless they take refuge in self-deception—will find their efforts marked by frustration and agonizing failure, which Paul captures with great force in this chapter. Now, the standard question here is, is he talking about himself as a Christian, or before he was a Christian, when he was trying to be a good Jew? After thinking about it quite a bit this week, I think the answer is, yes. You lay out the arguments for both interpretations, and there’s no clear reason to favor one or the other—there are strong arguments for both sides which really haven’t been answered. As such, I agree with Thomas R. Schreiner:

The arguments are so finely balanced because Paul does not intend to distinguish believers from unbelievers in this text. Paul reflects on whether the law has the ability to transform human beings, concluding that it does not. The law puts to death unbelievers who desire to keep it, since they lack the power to keep it. They are in bondage to sin and captives to sin, and when they encounter the law, death ensues.

On the other hand, believers are not absolutely excluded from this text either. It would be a mistake to read the whole of Christian experience from this account, for, as chapter 8 shows, believers by the power of the Spirit are enabled to keep God’s law. And yet since believers have not yet experienced the consummation of their redemption, they are keenly aware of their inherent inability to keep God’s law. When believers contemplate their own capacities, it is clear that they do not have the resources to do what God demands. In encountering God’s demands, we are still conscious of our wretchedness and inherent inability. The struggle with sin continues for believers because we live in the tension between the already and the not yet. . . . Complete deliverance from sin is not available for Christians until the day of redemption.

The key, then, is this: what Paul describes in the second half of this chapter is the experience of anyone who tries to live by law rather than by grace, whether they are saved or unsaved. For those who aren’t saved, of course, the problem is more severe; but as we’ve seen before, even for us, there is always the temptation to slide back into legalism—and that just won’t do it. We cannot make ourselves good by our own effort, we cannot make ourselves good by following rules, because even if the rules are perfect, we aren’t, and can’t be. Only Jesus can make us good, and only Jesus can save us. Anything else is a false hope, no matter how good it looks; the only real hope we have is Jesus, and him alone.

(Jeremiah 17:5-11; Romans 6:15-23)

Have any of you ever heard of the Alcan Highway? If you’re not familiar with it, it was built during the Second World War to connect Alaska with the Lower 48, running through northern British Columbia and the Yukon. It was an adventure to drive the Alcan then; it still is, though at least all 1,387 miles of it are paved—except where the weather has destroyed the pavement, anyway. Well into the 1960s, however, it was all gravel, and a challenge only a bold driver with a tough truck would want to face. The difficulties of the Alcan in those days are neatly captured in a story told by Ray Stedman, a longtime evangelical pastor and writer in the Bay Area out in California. Why he was driving up there I don’t remember, but he told of crossing the border into Alaska and seeing a sign that read, “Choose your rut carefully—you’ll be in it for the next 200 miles.”

Choose your rut carefully. It is, I can attest, good advice on any four-wheel-drive road; and it’s wise advice for life more generally, because it reminds us that our actions and decisions are not independent of each other. As the old aphorism has it, “Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” Every thought we entertain, every step we take, every choice we make, influences the thoughts we will have, the steps we will take, the choices we will make, in the future. What we do and think in this moment isn’t just about this moment, it influences what we will do and think, and who we will be, tomorrow and the next day. Repeated thoughts, repeated actions, create ruts in our lives that become the path of least resistance; with enough repetition, habit makes our decisions for us.

We tend to resist Paul’s language in this passage, and even to resent it; we don’t like the idea that we’re either slaves to sin or slaves to God. There is something in us that wants to believe, as William Ernest Henley put it in his poem “Invictus,” that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls. The truth is, though, that Paul has the right of it. Left to ourselves, our habits will master us, and they will be driven by our desires and shaped by our fears. We may think of that as freedom—the freedom not to be righteous, as Paul notes—but it’s no such thing, because in that state we cannot choose anything else. We are firmly in the grip of sin.

Only Jesus can set us free; and once he’s done so, he calls us to follow and serve him. From that point on, everything we think and say and do serves either to lay down a new groove in our lives, to build and reinforce new habits and patterns which are pleasing to him and in accordance with his will, or to put us back in the old rut. There are no other options, because every thought and every action either serves Jesus, or it doesn’t—and if it doesn’t, then it’s in service to sin. There’s no middle ground here, as if there were some other good out there besides God. As Bob Dylan put it, “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

Therefore, Paul says, “You are slaves of the one whom you obey,” whether that be God or sin. Which raises the question: does that mean we can actually be re-enslaved to sin? Is he suggesting that we can lose our salvation? No, for he makes it clear that God has set us free from sin, and what God has done, no one can undo. But though we cannot lose our salvation in the life to come, we can most certainly lose the blessings of salvation in this life—as so many of the people of Israel did. Remember the passage from Exodus last week, how God delivered Israel by opening a road for them through the sea? Well, when the Israelites saw Pharaoh’s army come over the horizon, do you think they responded with faith that God would deliver them? No, they complained to Moses, “What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we tell you to leave us alone and let us serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to stay in slavery than to die out here in the desert.”

That wasn’t a one-time complaint, either. Exodus 16:3:

The Israelites said . . . “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Exodus 17:3:

The people . . . grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”

Numbers 11:4-6:

The Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! In Egypt, we ate fish at no cost—we had cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we’ve lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

Numbers 14:2-4:

All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! . . . Why is the LORD bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”

And on, and on, and on . . .

Now, mark this. When the journey was tough, or when they wanted something they couldn’t have in the wilderness, did the Israelites tell themselves that it was worth it to be free? No, they whined and complained and talked about the good old days when they were slaves in Egypt. God had freed them from their slavery, and he was leading them to the land he had promised them, a land where they could prosper—but that meant they had to serve him, and they didn’t want to do that. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep their focus on the blessing God had given them, much less the blessing he had in store for them; they couldn’t see past the pleasures they’d left behind, even though those pleasures had come with the agonies of slavery to a king who hated them. As a result, they made themselves miserable, they trained themselves to distrust God, and most of them never got to see the Promised Land at all.

You see, that’s the foolishness of “taking advantage” of grace, of using it as an opportunity to sin: it misses the whole point. Paul says at the end of chapter 5, “Where sin abounded, grace superabounded”—but how? In blessing for Israel? No, as Israel continued to rebel against God and refuse to trust him, God had to keep judging them, repeatedly and drastically. He remained faithful to them despite their faithlessness, he kept them together as a people and kept his promises to them, which he ultimately fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and in that, he showed them grace far beyond their sin; but they still missed out on much of the blessing God had for them.

Sin bears fruit, but its fruit is poisonous; it pays its soldiers what looks like a good wage, but that wage is death. Following Jesus, you don’t get free food in the land of slavery, you get a long road through the wilderness, and sometimes it’s hard and stony, and sometimes it’s full of thorns; but the end is life, and along the way, you learn that the wilderness is a beautiful place. It’s not pretty, it’s not comfortable, it’s wild and unpredictable and unsafe; but it’s beautiful, and it’s an adventure, and the adventure is full of the wild and unpredictable glory of God—and if you hang on to him, he will always bring you through. As John Piper put it, “If you live gladly to make others glad in God, life will be hard, risks will be high, and your joy will be full”—and it will be worth it.

Every choice you face either takes you deeper into the wilderness, where Jesus leads, or back toward the safety of slavery in Egypt—and makes you a little more likely to go that way with the next choice. Choose your rut carefully; you’ll be in it a long time.

(Exodus 14:15-31; Romans 6:1-14)

Moses and Aaron contended with Pharaoh and his magicians for the freedom of Israel, announcing the plagues God would send in judgment unless Pharaoh let Israel go free. After the last and worst, the angel of death that killed every firstborn son in Egypt, Pharaoh let them go. But God did not lead Israel by the normal route out of Egypt—instead, he led them down to the seashore and told them to make camp there. Pharaoh pursued them with his army and came upon them in that place, and the people of Israel panicked; but God stood between Israel and the army of Egypt, and he opened a road through the sea. He brought his people out on dry ground through the water, and then he allowed the Egyptians to follow them—and once they were out in the midst of the sea, he threw them into a panic, and then he released the water, and they were drowned.

The people of Israel passed through the water from Egypt, where they were slaves to Pharaoh, into the wilderness, where they were free to follow and serve God. They passed out of the land of death and into the land of life; the sea was the boundary between the two. Was it the water that delivered the Israelites? No, God delivered the Israelites. Indeed, he had already delivered them by this point; the passage through the Red Sea was simply the exclamation point, the final blow to Pharaoh, the act that sealed their deliverance and made the finality of God’s work obvious to everyone—even to hard-headed, hard-hearted Pharaoh. Israel through the centuries would look back to the passage through the Red Sea not because there was anything magical about the Red Sea, but because it was a sign and a symbol that encapsulated God’s great work of deliverance.

This was the physical reality of the Exodus, when God freed his people from slavery in Egypt; and it’s the story Paul is retelling in a theological, spiritual way as he explains the new Exodus, in which Jesus Christ has freed his people from slavery to sin. It might seem odd that he would do so here, but he does so for a profoundly important reason. He has said in chapter 5 that the law only served to make sin worse, but that the grace of God only increased all the more in response; but to that, the skeptic might well ask, “If that’s the case, why shouldn’t we just go ahead and sin, then? If the law can’t handle sin, how is grace going to make it better?”

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, one of the great 20th-century gospel preachers, had this to say about this in his commentary on Romans 6:

The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel.

This is because, as Paul lays out in this chapter, the gospel deals with sin at a deeper level than the law, at a deeper level than mere obedience; and so people who look no deeper than to ask what they have to do in order to get the reward they want will tend to find in the gospel an excuse to sin. But Paul says, no, the gospel is about much more than just having a list of things to do and not do—the gospel tells us that we have a whole new life, that we live in a whole new world, and everything is different. We have passed through the water, out of the land of slavery and death and into the land of life.

Now, it isn’t the water of baptism that saves us, any more than it was the water of the Red Sea that saved the Israelites; Paul is using the word “baptism” here to represent the whole of God’s work of conversion and salvation in our lives, much as we might say “White House” to refer to the President and the whole administration. We don’t believe the actual house makes any decisions, and Paul doesn’t believe that the water transforms us. The water, however, is a sign and a symbol of God’s transforming work, and even if it doesn’t bring about salvation by itself, it matters, because God has chosen to use it.

The key is the truth signified in baptism: by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, and therefore we no longer live under the power of sin; as Paul says in Colossians, we have been transferred from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus Christ, in whom our sins have been forgiven, by whom we have been redeemed. Our old selves died when Christ was crucified, and were buried with him in his tomb—but when he got up, they didn’t; when he rose from the dead, he brought us with him, alive in him, sharing in his resurrection life. If you can look at your life and see a point in time when you came to faith, that is the point at which you first experienced your salvation in Christ, but that isn’t the point when your salvation was accomplished; when he died and rose again, you were saved then.

This, then, is how the gospel of grace is an answer to human sin—it changes our reality at the ground level. God has transformed us at the very core through the work of Christ. We are all born slaves to sin, under its power, completely convinced that we are who sin tells us we are—convinced, indeed, that we want to be slaves, that our slavery is really freedom. In Christ, those false selves are put to death, and we are raised again to life as new people over whom sin has no power, because the power of sin is the power of death, and the life of Christ has overcome death. We have crossed out of sin’s kingdom; we still have one foot in this world, but our true life is in the incoming kingdom of God.

Thus, Paul says, live like what you are. “Sin will not reign over you, since you are not under law but under grace”; therefore “do not let sin reign over you.” You are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus; therefore “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Live as what you are—and when you don’t, face up to it squarely and admit it. The world loves to make excuses for sin, which mostly seem to boil down to this in the end: “It isn’t fair to expect me to be any better or to live up to your standards, because I’m only human.” As Christians, we can’t say that. We have been united with Christ, and we are no longer “only human” in that sense—we live in the power and presence of God. By faith in Jesus, we have a better life than that; we just need to learn to walk by faith, to live by grace, as those who have been made new in him.

(Genesis 2:15-17, Genesis 3:1-8; Romans 5:12-21)

Death looms large for me this weekend. In a few hours, we will celebrate a service of witness to the resurrection in honor of the life of Virginia Zuck; of course, hers was not exactly a life cut short, but even so. Last week, Anna Johnston’s grandmother died. This week, someone else for whom we’ve been praying got the news: stage 4 liver cancer. And David Chastain spent a fair bit of this week sitting in a hospital room in Elkhart with his foster father, who was frighteningly close to death before taking a turn for the better. Sometimes we may forget, but we live in a world that is born toward dying, and we cannot escape that fact very long before reality forces us to face it.

Death is our inheritance, because sin is our heritage. When Adam rebelled against God, the whole human race died with him—spiritually first, as sin alienated us from God, with physical death following close behind as a consequence. That was the legacy Adam left to all his descendants, and the kind of life he passed on to us—a life poisoned by sin and broken by death.

This disaster was so great and so complete that God chose to make it better by first making it worse: by giving his people his law. Sin isn’t counted when there is no law, but its power is at work nevertheless, and so death reigns regardless—it’s just that nobody knows why, and so they come up with all kinds of ideas to explain it, and to try to make it better, somehow. The law identifies the problem, and seems to offer a solution; but that doesn’t make it any better, because even once we have the law, we continue to sin. It’s just that now our sin is even worse than before, because now when we sin we’re knowingly breaking a direct commandment from God—which means that the law doesn’t reduce sin, it only increases it. The law shows us how we’re messed up, and how badly we’re messed up, and then it leaves us there, helpless to fix it.

The law is bad news, but it’s a blessing anyway because we need the bad news if we’re going to understand the good news. In forcing us to face the terrible situation into which we’re born, the law shows us that we need Jesus and his sacrifice. We do not naturally understand this. We don’t naturally think we’re that bad—we may realize the world is that bad, we may know that other people are that bad, but we don’t think we are that bad. We can’t buy the idea that God would do anything that drastic and extreme to save us because we don’t think he’d have to. Our understanding of our sin and our need for salvation is too small for us to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news.

Let me give you an example. When Dr. Delores Williams of Union Seminary in New York said, “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff,” she also declared, “I think Jesus came for life and how to live together, what life was all about. . . . Jesus’ mandate is that we pass on tough love, love that’s whipping the thieves out of the temple.” She thought that was enough. She couldn’t understand the need for the atonement because she thought “tough love”—done by us who are the good people to them who are bad—she thought that combined with the power of a good example, that was enough to do what Jesus came to do. The law tells us, no, no, no—what is wrong with us is much worse, and much deeper, than that. The rot goes much deeper, and much farther. We can’t be satisfied with Jesus whipping the thieves out of the temple unless we realize, all the way down, that we are the thieves.

And then we realize that the same week he drove them out of the temple, he died for them—he died for us. We realize that God came down to be one of us, to live the life of perfect obedience that Adam abandoned, and then to take the weight of all our sin and all our death on himself and to die for a guilt that was not his—and yes, hanging on a cross, and blood dripping, and exactly all that stuff, to know the ugliest and cruelest part of this world in his own body—and take all of it all the way down to Hell where it belongs; and then to rip open the gates of Hell and blow out the power of sin from the inside, that he might lead us all out of that slavery and into freedom. God reached out and took our alienation from him into himself that it might no longer stand between us and him. He took our death, and he gave us life in return.

Because of this, through Jesus Christ, we have been delivered from the domination of sin and death and brought into a state of grace. We have a new life in which the grace of God reigns in righteousness; we have been cleansed of the guilt of sin by the sacrifice of Christ, and we have been freed from the control of sin in our lives, such that we are able to live in a righteous way, in a way that is pleasing to God. Though we were born toward dying—and though we still know that reality as we live in this world, as we do still sin, and sicken, and die—yet now we live toward resurrection, as God has given us his life through Jesus Christ, and his life has overcome death and will overcome it.

This is the only way of salvation—Jesus is the only way. I think that’s why Paul uses the word “all” in verse 18; he’s not saying that all people will be saved—that’s clear from the rest of the passage—but that all those who find life, all those who find justification before God, find it through Christ. Or rather, are found by him, for the initiative is his. But there is no other way, there is no other option, because only Jesus had the power to deliver us from sin and reconcile us to God, and only his sacrifice was big enough to accomplish that. No merely human work can ever save.

At the same time, no merely human work can undo or overpower the saving work of God in Jesus Christ. If the purpose of the law was to make sin worse, yet the grace of God is still greater, and his faithfulness to his people and his purpose is still unshakeable. Even if you could dig so deep as to lay out your sleeping bag in Hell’s sub-basement, the grace of God would still find you, with plenty to spare; and if you could flee to the farthest and most desolate corner of reality, you would still turn around to see God waiting there for you, reaching out to you in love. No matter how much sin may increase, yet the grace of God is still infinitely greater. No matter how great your sin may be, or mine, no matter what hold it might have over your life, no matter what power death might have over you, the grace of God is still infinitely greater for you, so that in your life grace might reign through righteousness, which is the eternal life of God in us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Let’s pray.

(Hosea 11; Romans 5:1-11)

“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.”