Romans 5 study

1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

2 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.

In Chapter 5 of Romans, we are gathered to listen to Paul, the prosecuting attorney who in chapters 1-3, found all of us, whether Jew or Gentile, guilty of sin before God and thus worthy of eternal death.

In chapter 4, Paul released us from condemnation and prison and took us to the mountain peaks of God's grace. There we learned what Abraham and David had learned long before us. Simply trusting the cross work of Christ results in mercy granted because the Judge's Son, Jesus, paid our debt in it's entirety.

Now we are cloaked in His eternal righteousness, fully forgiven, with a new relational status with our Judge; He is now our own dear Father! Note that peace with God is given at spiritual birth, while the peace of God has much to do with our growth and obedience to Him. In either case, we are always under grace. To "fall from grace" is to seek some other means of pleasing God rather than faith in Christ and His finished work on the cross.

We are helped to realize the enormity of the charges against us by the cost paid to free us. It cost God, the Righteous Judge, His own dear Son, Jesus. His sinless blood alone could pay our debt of offence which we were powerless to pay. Both the Father and the Son freely gave for our salvation; the Father His Son, the Son Himself.

Yes, our elder Brother died to save us, but He left a will! Now Paul is our attorney, no longer reading our death sentence, but listing our inherited provisions for our new life of freedom and victory! Our Savior not only paid for our salvation from Hell, but left us with the provision of the gold of Heaven to meet every need!

3 Not only so, but we] also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;

4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.

5 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.

Here, Paul, leaves his attorney role and shows his conciliatory fatherly nature. Now he speaks as a fellow partaker of our sanctifying experience. It is of tremendous help in understanding salvation to see it in three connected parts; first, we are saved from the PENALTY of sin by Christ's death in the past. Second, we are PRESENTLY being saved daily from the POWER of sin in us and around us by interacting with His Word.

Christ's presence is with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit, and He manifests Himself to us as He promised. Third; we will be saved in the FUTURE form the very PRESENCE of sin. The last stage is called "glorification" and involves our final, full transformation into the image of Jesus! We will never be God as He is, but we will be thoroughly good as He is in all His beauty.

Failure in the SECOND part (sanctification) does not nullify the surety of the first and third parts! God knows the Christian is His child forever, but do not expect men to believe it if you live like a child of the world. It is God's will and to His glory that we grow spiritually able to help a lost and dying world to find the dear Savior!

It is the present part of our salvation that Paul speaks of in 3-5. We are to grow to take a mature spiritual look at difficulties in life. Such trials are not put upon us as punishment or to crush us. No, they are part of God's wise plan to cause us to bloom to His glory and our good.

Blind faith is not a Biblical term ever, and certainly not here. Paul demonstrates that the troubles that fracture worldly lives are to be viewed as helpers to the progressive development of Christian character. And certainly, Christian character is merely the outworking of the inner life of the Spirit of God in every believer.

Viewed correctly, such trials are to be welcomed rather than resented, cherished rather than resisted. May we all learn this difficult lesson! How often have the dreaded clouds of apprehension over the Christian's head broken to reveal the shining Son of Righteousness in all His wondrous glory! Alas, how slow this writer to learn this truth!

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.

8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Vs. 6-8 reminds us that Apostolic preaching never gets far from the foundation of faith no matter how lofty the building becomes! In all of his writings, Paul is like a new husband who continually pauses to kiss his wife while extolling her virtues to the rest of the family!

Here he reminds us of at least two great facts; our unworthiness and the God of all grace's demonstrated love for us in the offering of His Son for us. The old hymn states, "He loved me ere I knew Him." Yes, and died to prove it before we knew Him! What a Savior! Let us too, "kiss the Son"!

9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!

10 For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

11 Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Did you catch the exultation in Paul's "voice"? We are presently justified forever! We will never go to Hell, fail as we might. Yet there is provision made for victory every day in every way because JESUS is ALIVE! We were saved to walk with God!

What Adam lost, the reality and enjoyment of God's presence, has been restored to us through the death of Christ! His death saved us from Hell, His life saves our lives for Heaven. We need not come to the Judgment seat of Christ where our works are evaluated as failures of the flesh fit only for the fire!

The Spirit of Christ, apprehended by faith and appropriated as our food through the Scriptures, can make the weakest among us "like David" at the peak of his spiritual powers. We have been reconciled. God has been reconciled to us through Christ, but so have we likewise been reconciled to Him!

Once we foolishly and blindly formed a god out of our evil imaginations. But NOW we are completely reconciled to the God of the Scriptures who is far beyond our feeble imagination's capability to invent. Surely, as we learn Jesus, Fanny Cosby's words "visions of RAPTURE now BURST on our sight" come to mind. Let us rejoice in the eternal, immutable truth of our salvation in Christ in all of it's fullness.
 
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—

13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.

14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

Having established the fact of our salvation, Paul now elaborates on man's post Adam, pre-Law experience. Although the Law, (the Ten Commandments, not to be confused with the rest of the OT revelation, which is often called in it's entirety the law of God) was not yet given and men had no commandment to break as Adam had, yet the fact that they were born sinners and acted sinfully is testified to by the simple fact that they died physically. Sin and death are connected by a chain that no one but Him who forged it can break. Our Heavenly Samson snapped this chain as easily as the earthly Samson did the ropes of the enemy.

Also, Adam is here shown to be a pattern for Jesus Christ. How so? Adam was created sinless; Jesus was born sinless. Adam was tested as to obedience. Jesus was also tested. Adam entered into sin so as not to be separated from Eve. Christ entered into sin so as not to be separated from man. Adam died and was (presumably) buried. Christ also died and was buried.

Similarities are over, contrasts arise! Adam failed one test and died for his own sin, Christ never failed any of many tests and died for the world's sin. Adam was seduced by the Devil through Eve. Christ voluntarily entered into our sin and our death out of pure love for the Father and for us. Adam's body is still in the ground, but Christ arose forever in a real, glorified body. Because Adam sinned once, we were all born sinners. Because Jesus died once, we believers are forgiven and alive forevermore!

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!

16 Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.

17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
 
The real difference between Adam and Christ is now seen in a contrast of the results of their actions. Adam as the representative man before God failed in one sin, resulting in death for all his descendants. ( Death is seen as physical but also spiritual. Both types speak of separation; one, the spirit from the body, the other the spirit from God.)

Christ, as the Second Adam, represents man to God by offering His own blood to pay the entire debt of sin of every man once and for all time and eternity. The difference in the magnitude of results in Christ sacrifice as compared to the Adam's sin is now addressed by Paul.

One sin plunged mankind into darkness, defeat and death. But one sacrifice paid not only for Adam's one sin but for all of his posterity's countless acts of evil that sprung from that initial act of defiance! Christ's death paid not only the principal of the debt incurred to God but also the accumulated debt of interest on Adam's investment of sin through the centuries!

Yes, sin and death were our legacy from Adam. We received our inheritance and invested it in sins with the usual results. But our great Kinsman Redeemer paid the debt we could not pay with the coin of Heaven, His own sinless blood, and took us on as His own forever!

18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.

19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

Of course, Paul is not teaching the error that some careless "scholars" have twisted these verses to mean. In spite of numerous verses to the contrary, they insist that since Christ died for all, all are automatically saved.

This is the doctrine of Universalism, and in case you missed my point, it's wrong! Although every sin of every person who ever lived was fully paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ, yet only those who believe receive the purchased pardon. Jesus said, "The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins .." This indicates the need of forgiveness and the time of forgiveness.

One's sins MUST be forgiven in a conscious trusting of the Gospel of Christ. And it must be done on earth, since it will never be done in Heaven! No sinner will ever enter Heaven, so one must be saved NOW while it is called today!

The fact is that there is ONE sin that Christ did NOT die for and that is the "unpardonable sin" that He warned hardened religionists against committing. This sin is the consistent resistance to the testimony of the Holy Spirit to the truth of who Jesus Christ is, namely, God in the flesh. He is as much God as God and as much man as man, albeit, sinless man.

20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,

21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Here Paul addresses the purpose of the Law after he has established the truth that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ. The Law "was added" because it revealed the sinfulness of sin before a Holy God. The larger purpose was to cause sinners to seek mercy in the atonement of Christ. And yet the effect of the Law was to actually motivate sinners to sin more! Don't believe it? Wait until chapter seven of Romans where Paul opens to us the inner workings of His own heart as he wrestles with conflicting truths!

Paul points out that at one time, before conversion to Jesus, we followed the dictates of our sinful heart. We really had no power to do otherwise, nevertheless, we were going deeper into debt all the time. Now, however, things are different! We are not under the Law which didn't work in producing holiness anyway. Instead, we are called to recognize that we are not to put ourselves under the rule of the lusts of our old nature. No Law, no sinful old nature, should rule us anymore! The tyranny is broken and we are under the gentle governing of GRACE!

We are to be controlled by the voice of God speaking through the Scriptures. The hand of Jesus is on our shoulder and the Holy Spirit sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts. On our other shoulder, is the hand of the church, representing every blood-bought child of God, regardless of denomination. We are united by the same spirit, yet many of us do not yet walk in that knowledge. "He that has the Son, has life. He that has not the Son, has not life."

Not all are yet mature enough in the knowledge of Him to walk peaceably with true brothers. But those who are, should extend the hand of friendship in brotherly love to every blood washed child of God, seeking to help them grow into Christ likeness. May He find us thus when He comes in the air for His Bride to snatch us away into the Father's house for an eternity of love!

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