(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.”

(Genesis 15:1-6, Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16; Romans 3:27-4:25)

At Regent one year, they asked Dave Diewert, who teaches Hebrew, to preach a sermon on “The Family of God.” Diewert’s an interesting guy, not too inhibited by conventional expectations, and he opened the sermon by telling us that when they asked him, his first thought was, “God help us.”

He titled that message “The Dysfunctional Family of God,” and he didn’t pull any punches, because the Bible doesn’t. If you imagine the model churchgoing family, then think of the exact opposite, the opposite is a lot closer to what we see in the Old Testament. Cain kills his brother, Ham sees his father naked, Abraham has a child by his maid and tries to pass off his wife as his sister, Jacob cheats his brother and his uncle (though his uncle scammed him first), his sons kill off an entire town and sell their brother into slavery, Judah’s daughter-in-law is forced to run a sting operation on him to keep her place in the family . . . then you get to Moses and David, and the stories don’t get any better. The family God chose is not the sort we would have chosen, if it were up to us.

But then, if we were going to try to transform the world, we wouldn’t have chosen a family at all. We generally try to change the world through governments, rulers, diplomats, armies, constitutions, treaties, and mass movements of one form or another. Our instruments of change are politicians, media figures, and business leaders, the rich, the famous and the powerful, people who can command wide attention and vast numbers of minions to do their bidding. We work from the top down and aim as high as we can. But God begins with a family—just one—and his instruments of change are fathers and mothers. Even when his family becomes a nation, the family relationships of its rulers stand at the center of everything else that happens, for good or ill; the Bible is much more interested in David the husband and father than David the general.

God wants to teach us things we can only learn from family, whether the family in which we’re born or one of the other families to which we become attached over the course of life, including the church. Partly that’s because it’s in our families that we first learn to live by law, and thus it must be in our families that we first learn what it means to experience grace, and to show grace, and to live by faith. More, family gives us the ability to show each other grace to a degree that the world cannot match, because we’re committed to each other in ways that the rest of the world never will be. (This is probably why Mother’s Day has a different feel to it than Father’s Day; it isn’t true in every case, but in general, mothers tend to be more the parents through whom grace comes.)

That’s why Paul turns to the story of Abraham in chapter 4. He’s stated the purpose of God’s work in history in 1:16-17, to bring salvation to all who believe; in 1:18-3:20, he’s shown us why that’s necessary, telling the story of the Fall and its disastrous effects on humanity. In 3:21-26 he tells us God’s solution to that problem, that God has given us salvation in and through Jesus Christ alone. Now here, he shows us God putting his plan into motion, beginning the steps that will lead to Jesus—and again, God doesn’t begin with laws or nations. Those will come later, within the family; the family is first. It’s through the family, not through the law or the ruler, that God will reconcile the world to himself; and for all the problems with that family, it was a family that operated by faith from the very beginning. What, after all, was the righteousness of Abraham? When God made him a promise he could never verify, he believed God, and took action accordingly.

We need to understand this, because Paul isn’t just discussing technical details of how God saves us—he’s laying out a whole approach to life which is profoundly different from any form of legalism, including that of his Jewish critics. In lifting up Abraham, he’s trying to show them that the life of faith he’s laying out precedes the Old Testament Law, and in fact underlies the Law—that what he’s talking about is what the Old Testament was really all about from the beginning. Those who think they are standing for the Law against Paul are really doing nothing of the sort: they’ve read the letter of the Law, but they’ve completely missed the spirit and the point of it.

Now, why do I say that? Consider the question: once you’ve been made right with God, once you have this status as one of God’s people—then what? The Jews would say, well, then you keep the law, and if you keep it well enough, then you hang on to that status. Then you debate what constitutes “well enough,” and you get into all the drawing of lines and splitting of hairs that characterizes legalism in all its forms. To that, Paul says, no: look at Abraham. Abraham didn’t keep the law, because he didn’t have the law. But when God called him to go, he went, and when God told him to do, he did, trusting that God knew what he was doing and would be faithful to keep his promise. Faith isn’t just the beginning of the life with God, it is the whole of the life with God.

Put another way, to say we are justified through faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone doesn’t only mean that we have been saved through faith in Christ alone—it means we are being saved through faith in Christ alone, and that the life we have been given is a life we live through faith in Christ alone. It’s not that faith in Christ gets you in the door, and then you live by law the rest of the way—it’s all by faith, every step.

The Old Testament is still God’s word to us; it’s still important for us as we seek to know God better, and to understand how to live in a way that pleases him; but it doesn’t function for us as a checklist. It isn’t: here’s a list of things you have to do, and if you do them well enough then you’ll keep God happy. It isn’t: if your life looks enough like this list, then you’re better than everyone around you and you have reason to brag about how holy you are. That’s not what the law is for, because that sort of checklist holiness isn’t what God is on about. You can live a highly moral life because you love Jesus and want more than anything else to please him in everything you do; or you can live a highly moral life because you worship your reputation and want everyone to admire your holiness. The first is Paul, the second is the Pharisees.

Now, if we cannot justify ourselves before God by keeping the law, it follows that we cannot do his work by imposing his law on others. This is not to say that all law is bad—it’s obvious that societies need laws, and households need rules, and the content of those laws and rules is obviously a proper concern of ours; we do have a responsibility to do what we can to see that they reflect the character of God, and especially his justice. But it is to say that we must not fool ourselves: while laws and rules have their place, they will never be of primary importance in accomplishing the purposes of God.

God send us better laws, and better politicians to write and administer them, but we will not make this country what God would have it to be through laws and politicians. And God make us better mothers and fathers, of our own children or someone else’s, but may we never think that’s primarily about being lawgivers to our children; we will not raise them to be who God would have them to be by dictating their decisions. For our lives, for our children, for our nation, for our church, we are called to follow the example of Abraham: recognize that it’s all God’s work, not anything we can make happen in our own strength, and live accordingly. Trust not in our own holiness, to measure ourselves by the morality of our neighbors; trust not in our understanding of the laws of economics, to let the numbers on the balance sheet govern our decisions; trust not in our ability to make laws for others, as if external compulsion could ever produce inner change. Rather, go as God inspires us to go, do what he puts before us to do, make decisions as best as we understand him to be leading us—and trust him for the rest.

(Leviticus 16:11-19; Romans 3:1-26)

Three years ago, while I was at a conference in Chicago, Sara took the girls to the Shedd Aquarium. She figured we’d go back sometime when I could go too, so she bought a family membership. She was right, of course—I love aquariums—and the day we all went, we got there to find, not a line for admission, but a crowd stretching down the steps and well out into the park. It looked like we were going to be there a long time, but Sara worked her way up to the doors and discovered that the Shedd has a separate members’ entrance; a few minutes later, we were in.

That was essentially the popular Jewish view of salvation in Paul’s day, except of course that the great crowds wouldn’t get in at all. That’s what they understood their advantage with God to mean: access to him and his favor from which everyone else was excluded. Paul, of course, thoroughly destroys that idea in chapter 2, leaving his opponents to say, “If that’s the case, then there’s really no advantage to being a Jew at all, is there?” Was God’s blessing on his chosen people just a cruel joke?

To this Paul says, no, the Jews had a great advantage: God had given them his word and his promises. They didn’t have to figure out the big questions of life on their own—as a nation, they knew the creator of the whole world, and he had told them who he was, how he wanted them to live, and what his purpose was for them. They knew that someone all-good, all-wise and all-powerful had charge of their destiny, and everyone else’s, and that he would always be faithful and true no matter what; and they knew he had promised to bless them. The thing was, he had also promised to judge them if they were unfaithful to him, if they did not keep his commands; God could not simply ignore sin or wave it away as unimportant. As Paul shows, for God to do that, even for his own people, would be to violate his own righteousness.

Paul drives his point home, that Jews are under sin just as much as Gentiles, with a long catalog of denunciation from the Old Testament, which he concludes with the observation that “whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law”—the Jews are not exempt from this—so that “the whole world may be held accountable to God,” and no one may have any excuse to make for themselves. And then he says this, which crystallizes the dilemma in his argument: “No human being will be justified in God’s sight through works of the law, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” Implicit here is the recognition that no one can keep the law perfectly, and the understanding that the righteousness of God demands no less.

And yet, while God cannot be false to his own character, and thus cannot simply accept human sin and let it stand—to do so would be a betrayal of his justice—at the same time, he cannot be false to his character and simply leave the world to its sin, with no hope of salvation; to do so would be a betrayal of his love, which seeks to make us righteous—to restore us to right relationship with him. If we could make ourselves perfect, this wouldn’t be a problem, but we can’t; we have all sinned, and we all continue to sin, despite our best efforts. We are all each day falling short of the glory of God, and it’s beyond our strength to change that. For God to be true to his character, then, he somehow had to make us perfect himself.

Thus we have verses 21-26, which are the second thematic passage in Romans. We had 1:16-17, which state the theme of the letter, and then this long section through 3:20 which tells the story of the Fall, thus setting forth the problem to be solved. Here Paul tells us God’s solution: Jesus Christ. God’s saving righteousness does not come to us through the law, which depends on our effort; rather, it is entirely by his own action. The law could not permanently appease the wrath of God against sin, nor could it permanently remove human guilt—it was just a temporary measure until Jesus should come, who could and did permanently remove our guilt and pay the penalty for our sin by dying in our place on the cross. He took all our evil and all our unrighteousness on himself on the cross, and he took it down with him into death, so that in him we might be made forever right with God.

It’s important that we understand this. To say we are Christians isn’t to say we’re good people, it’s to confess that we aren’t, but God loves us anyway. To say that we’re Christians isn’t to say we found the truth, it’s to admit that we weren’t looking for it, but he found us anyway. To call ourselves Christians isn’t to say that we have the right to judge others, it’s to humbly acknowledge that we deserve judgment, but received mercy anyway. To proclaim ourselves Christians isn’t to praise ourselves, it’s to declare that all our praise is for Jesus, who knew we were unworthy and saved us anyway. For any of us to say “I am a Christian” isn’t to claim to be better or more moral or holier than anyone else, it is to affirm with Paul, “Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” The glory, the credit, the honor, the praise, are to Christ alone.