Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
State College, PA
In 1977, I was working with a traveling team in Uttar Pradesh, a state in North India. We stopped for a day or two at the office while the state leader was away, and as I was going through his books I picked up Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, a series of sermons by the great Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who at that time was the pastor of Westminister Chapel in London. I started reading and was so taken by it that I couldn't set it aside. When we left, I took it with me, even though it wasn't possible to get permission to borrow it; I just couldn't part with it at the time. (I did later return it and eventually bought my own copy).
That book changed the way I read Scripture, because Lloyd-Jones was so insistent on observing the context and paying attention to why the authors of Scripture said things in the way they did. So often we go wrong by taking a verse or a chapter out of context without being careful to observe what the author is trying to say and why he goes about saying it in the way he does.
Lloyd-Jones also spent thirteen years expounding the book of Romans, and at the beginning of his exposition of Romans 5, he points to the importance of the word "therefore:" He says, "I sometimes think that the whole secret of the Christian life is to know how to use the word ‘Therefore.' The Christian life is in many ways a matter of logic, a matter of deduction. The Christians who have shined most brightly throughout the centuries have always been those who have been able to use this ‘Therefore.' Correspondingly most failures in the Christian life are to be traced to an inability to use this word" (Romans: Assurance, pp. 1-2).
What Paul is doing in these early verses of chapter five is drawing a conclusion. In the beginning of the letter, through the early part of chapter three, he demonstrates that all, both Jews and Gentiles, are guilty of sin and are unable to save themselves by obeying the Law. Then he makes this great statement in the middle of chapter 3: "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe" (vv. 21-22). He continues to discuss this through the end of the chapter and then turns aside, in chapter 4, to answer the question this raises about Abraham and whether Abraham was also justified by faith rather than works. And then, having answered that question, he begins to discuss what this means for us. His word "therefore" tells us to recall what he has been saying and to understand that he is drawing a conclusion.
The first thing he says is that "having been justified by faith, we have peace with God." We need to pause here and take note of an alternate reading. Most Bibles have a footnote attached to this verse saying something like "Other ancient authorities read let us," or "let us have peace with God," rather than "we have peace with God." This alternate reading is an exhortation; it's telling us to do something, calling for a response. The overwhelming textual evidence is in favor of this alternate reading, and yet nearly all translators and commentators are agreed in rejecting it.
The difference between the two readings is only one letter, and in use they sounded pretty-much the same. The way multiple copies of manuscripts were made in the days before printing and photocopying was that one reader would read the text to multiple copiers, who would write down what they heard. So it's easy to see how, in this case, the wrong word could have crept into the text. In one very important manuscript the original copier wrote "let us have," and someone later corrected it to "we have." The reason the great majority of translators and commentators agree with this corrector is that "let us have peace with God" really doesn't fit with what Paul is doing here. He is making a series of statements about things that are true of us in Christ rather than exhorting us to respond in a particular way. So I think we can be confident that the reading we find in the text is the correct one, rather than the alternate that is listed in the margin.
What does it mean that we are at peace with God? Paul is not talking here about a feeling of inner peace, as he is, for example, in Philippians 4:7, when he says "And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." He's saying, as he points out later in this passage, that before we were justified we were God's enemies, that we were living in rebellion against the source of all good. We've been alienated from God, and now we are restored to have a relationship with Him, to have access into His presence. To be at peace with God means not that we feel a sense of inner peace but that we are free to enter God's presence as His children, as those who've been adopted into His family. We may not always feel good about our spiritual state; we may feel unworthy to come before God in prayer; but the truth is that we are at peace with Him and are welcome in His presence.
Paul goes on to stress that our peace with God in Christ is very secure. He says that we have "gained access to this grace," this sphere of favor with God. John Stott points out that "gained access" suggests that we took the initiative and says that a better translation might be that we have been introduced, "which acknowledges our unfitness to enter, and our need for someone to bring us in" (Romans, p. 140). We have been introduced to this grace, through no effort or worthiness of our own, and Paul describes us as "standing" in this grace. Here is Stott again: "Justified believers enjoy a blessing far greater than a periodic approach to God or an occasional audience with the king. We are privileged to live in the temple and in the palace. The perfect tenses express this. Our relationship with God, into which justification has brought us, is not sporadic but continuous, not precarious but secure." Paul makes this clear in vv 9-10. Since God has done this very difficult work of redeeming us when we were His enemies, how much more will He bring this work to completion.
Christians tend to go wrong in two ways about security. Charles Finney, the 19th Century American revivalist, has had an immense influence on some forms of present-day Evangelicalism. He said, in his Systematic Theology, that a "Christian... is justified no longer than he obeys, and must be condemned when he disobeys or Antinomianism is true ... In these respects, then, the sinning Christian and the unconverted sinner are upon precisely the same ground"(p. 46). I've known Christians who were influenced by him (often without even knowing his name) who saw themselves as moving back and forth between a saved a lost state, depending on whether or not they were living in perfect obedience and had remembered, and confessed, every sin. There's more that we could say about Finney and his theological orientation, but this hardly fits with Paul's description of "standing in grace." In Finney's view, and in the view of those who follow him, the Christian position is an extremely precarious one.
But I've also talked to people at the opposite extreme, who have no interest in Christ or the gospel, who would never set foot in a church but who are perfectly assured of their salvation because they went forward in an evangelistic meeting years ago and were told that they were saved for all eternity no matter what else happens. I had a conversation with a man once who told me that he was embittered against the church, didn't read his Bible and hated Christians. But he told me he was confident that he would be in heaven because he had been saved when he was 13, and "once saved, always saved." I don't doubt that he had good reason for his bitterness; awful things often happen in churches. But his understanding of salvation is very different from that of the apostle Paul. Being at peace with God, being reconciled to Him and standing in a state of grace means that we are living in a relationship with Him. It certainly doesn't fit in with the idea that we go forward in a meeting, say a prayer and then understand this as a ticket to heaven with no further thought of God until after our death. Being reconciled to God, being free to commune with Him, is a great privilege, not a chore.
Paul says, next, that God wants us to be aware of His love for us. He's objectively demonstrated that love by giving His Son to die for us: "But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." While we were living in active rebellion as God's enemies, He gave His only Son to bear the penalty of our sins. So God has objectively demonstrated His love for us, but the problem is that it's difficult for us to believe this. And even if we believe it, it's difficult for us to remember, because we so often sin and come under a sense of condemnation because of our sin. So at times it's almost impossible for us to be assured of God's love for us, despite all that He has done objectively to show us His love.
But Paul says that God has done something about this, that "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." It's clear from the following context that Paul is not talking here about our love for God but about His love for us. He's saying that the Holy Spirit, who has been given to all of us who believe in Him, pours into our hearts a realization of God's love for us. Sometimes He does this in an extraordinary way. A friend of ours who was a missionary in India for many years was going through a difficult time, feeling like she wasn't accomplishing anything of value and overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness. But then, one day God came to her and gave her a strong sense of His healing presence and repeated, over and over to her, the words "you are precious to me."
Henry Venn was a pastor in England in the 18th Century, a contemporary of the Wesleys and Whitefield. He had five young children when his wife died, and he wrote to a friend shortly afterward, "Did I not know the Lord to be mine, were I not certain His heart feels even more love for me than I am able to conceive, were not this evident to me, not by deduction and argument, but by consciousness, by His own light shining in my soul as the sun's doth upon my bodily eyes, into what a deplorable situation should I have been now cast?" (Lloyd-Jones, p. 82). Venn was in a position of great need, and God came to him with a strong and unmistakable assurance of His love.
But it doesn't always happen in such an extraordinary way. Sometimes God assures us of His love in quieter, more subtle ways, and yet we are reminded and assured that He loves us and is caring for us. Some years ago I was in the process of interviewing for a job that I very-much wanted to get. I didn't like the work I was doing at the time and felt very stressed about what was ahead in the future. I was going about my day at work, lifting up brief prayers about this when suddenly my whole outlook changed. I didn't have an overwhelming spiritual experience; it was more like my eyes were opened to a different way of looking at things and I knew that God had the situation in His care, that He loved me and would do the best thing. I remember this, that I was walking through a door at the time and when I came to the door I was thinking about it in one way, and as I passed through it all changed. I didn't do anything; it's not that I was able to reason myself into a different way of thinking. The Holy Spirit assured me, in a very quiet way, of God's love and care. From that moment I was able to leave the situation in His hands in a way that I was unable to do until then.
The last thing is that being secure in Christ and knowing God's love for us leads us to rejoice. Paul says we "rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (v. 2). We rejoice in our hope for the future of sharing in God's glory, being in His presence. Hope, as it's used in the New Testament, is different than the way we use the word when we say things like, "well, I sure hope this works out." John Stott describes it as "a joyful and confident expectation which rests on the promises of God" (p. 140). It's a hope because it lies in the future and we don't yet have full possession of it, but it is a secure and stable hope in the future, rooted in the promises of God.
We not only rejoice in our hope for the future; Paul goes on to say that we "rejoice in our sufferings" (v. 3), because our sufferings, in communion with Christ, are transforming us into the image of God, preparing us to live in His presence. It's not that suffering is good in any way. It's that because of our certain hope for the future, suffering is able to bring about good things, things for which we will be grateful when we arrive in God's kingdom. As Paul says a few chapters later in this letter, "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us" (8:18). And then, in verse 11, he says "More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation." We who were formerly God's enemies living under His condemnation are now reconciled to Him through Jesus Christ. And because of that we are able to rejoice in God. He is no longer a source of terror and condemnation but a loving Father in whom we find joy.
Years ago I was at a conference in Belgium, and we were all sleeping in an auditorium in sleeping bags. At six in the morning, this guy came bouncing in and yelled, "alright boys, it's time for exercises." I thought he was entirely too cheerful for that time of the morning and I was sure he was faking it. In fact, I found him so irritating that I had negative thoughts of him from time to time over the next two years while I was in India. But when I returned to Belgium I ended up sharing a room with him for a few weeks and I found him to be an absolute delight to be around. His joy was deep and genuine, and he cared deeply about the people he came into contact with. He was a model of the deep spiritual joy we can know as people who've been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.
Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish preacher in the 1600's. Here's something he wrote from prison: "Would to God that all this kingdom, and all that know God, knew what is betwixt Christ and me in this prison–what kisses, embracements, and love communion! I take his cross in my arms with joy; I bless it, I rejoice in it. Suffering for Christ is my garland. I would not exchange Christ for ten thousand worlds! Nay, if the comparison could stand, I would not exchange Christ with heaven" (The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, p. 213). As we continue in this Lenten season, may God enable us to know the certainty of our hope in Him, the stability of our position as we stand in this grace to which He has introduced us and to experience more and more the joy of His fellowship.
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