Romans 5 The Results of Justification

Romans 5

5:1-11 The results of justification by faith 

Paul's theology—what he calls his “gospel”—is not so much topical or systematic as it is narrative. There is a flow to it. This flow will also appear in the last part of chapter 8. But we see it clearly in the opening eleven verses of this chapter. “Justification”—God's rectifying of sinners—is the fountainhead of numerous gifts that logically flow freely to believers.

 But before we consider the individual benefits of our justification, we must remind ourselves of what justification means in Paul's thought. The Greek term δικαιοσύνη dikaiosunē “righteousness” and the related adjective δίκαιος dikaios “righteous; just” belong to the judicial-forensic sphere of thought. Their primary reference is to legal standing in a court of law, a fact that both Paul and his Roman audience were all too well aware of. In justification God removes through Jesus' death that which is the basis of our enmity with God, which is not our present hostile attitude but our objective guilt as sinners. That is why justification is the first and the absolutely essential act that must precede (logically, not chronologically) our peace with God and access to the state of grace.

 The first of these is “peace” with God. “Peace” is an overworked word in political discourse. “Peace” movements have a guaranteed front-page coverage in every newspaper and on every TV news segment. In that context the meaning of the word is the absence of war and violence. It is a utopian vision. Such "peace" will always be temporary, the intervals between wars.

Then there is  the use of the  term “peace” for peace of mind, the absence of worry and anxiety. There is a real sense in which Paul includes those two ideas of “peace” in this discourse. Peace with God in Paul's thought world does mean an end to hostility. Peace with God is the opposite of enmity with God. Sin is the cause of enmity with God. The first mention of enmity in the Bible is in God's words to Satan in the form of the serpent, after he had seduced Eve and Adam into sinning against God: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” (Gen 3:15).  Satan is our enemy because he facilitates sin in us, which separates us from God and makes us God's enemies.

Paul wrote in v. 10 “when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.”  Jesus destroyed the basis of that enmity by taking our sins upon himself. Our peace with God comes “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1). And because the  enmity, the hostility, has ceased, we also have peace of mind. Worries and fears are banished. When we now think of God—which before we believed was a rare and unpleasant experience, tinged with guilt and fears—it is with happiness and love and gratitude to One who so loves us and rescued us from the graves that we had dug for ourselves.

Once justified, the Christian is reconciled to God and experiences a peace that distressing troubles cannot upset, a hope that knows no disappointment, and a confidence of salvation of which he can truly boast. (Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 305). 

But this does not exhaust the important meanings incorporated in the biblical word “peace.” The Hebrew שלום shalôm which lies behind Paul's Greek word εἰρήνη eirēne, implies well-being, a state in which all is well. The familiar hymn “It is well with my soul” nicely expresses the condition of all of us who have believed in Jesus. The painful experiences of life in a sinful world are as nothing compared to the peace of God that envelopes us. “Though Satan should buffet,” the hymn-writer Horatio Spafford puts it in his beloved hymn It Is Well With My Soul,

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, let this blessed assurance control,

That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, and hath shed His own blood for my soul.

 The second gift that flows from our justification is grace (v. 2). The grace of God is that unconditioned love that he shows to the undeserving. “For God so loved the world,” the Apostle John wrote, “that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). God took the initiative; he did not wait for us to do so, since we could not and would not. But grace does not end with forgiving and accepting sinners as his children: it envelopes those whom God saves from that point on. It is a condition “in which we now stand” (v. 2). We are in grace.

Paul writes that through Jesus we have gained “access” (Greek προσαγωγὴ) to this grace. In his later letter to the Ephesian churches (Eph 2:18) he wrote that through Jesus we enjoy “access to the Father” (προσαγωγὴν … πρὸς τὸν πατέρα). The term translated “access” can also be rendered “introduction.” It can refer to the granting of private audience with a ruler. Such a privilege was exceedingly difficult to obtain: it had to be granted by the sovereign himself. Comparing Rom 2:2 with Eph 2:18 helps us to see that the grace is not something impersonal, but is actually a personal union and communion with God himself.  Nothing less can secure the flow of loving gifts that this chapter describes. To us he is not only a king: he is a Father.

The word “boast”—which elsewhere in Romans is a negative attitude, since its focus is upon the sinner's supposed ability to produce perfect righteousness by his own works—is here quite legitimate, since the boast is in what God has done. We boast in hope of the glory of God. But “hope”, as so often in the New Testament, is not idle wishes but a God-guaranteed certainty. Compare these other two Pauline references to hope for God's future glory:

“To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27) …… “while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13 NRSV).

 3-4  Paul uses here the literary technique called “framing”: the word “hope” both begins and ends the section comprised of verses 2-4. The Christian's hope is not undermined by the experience of “sufferings” (v. 3), as from a human point of view might otherwise be expected. The reason sufferings do not destroy hope is that when they are received by faith in the Suffering Savior who rose from the dead and ascended to glory at his Father's right hand, they actually start a chain of events which end in even more intense hope (v. 4). 

“How can this be?” you ask. It is because we Christians may work like beavers to alleviate human suffering and injustice. But our “hope” is not in a human solution. And if disappointments come in the form of mistrust in human leaders, we are not deterred. As the Hebrew psalms remind us, 

It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to put confidence in princes (Psa. 118:9).
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help (Psa. 146:3).

Although we work for a more God-pleasing life for ourselves and others, when such disappointments  come, they merely sharpen our hope for the “final solution” of our Lord Jesus Christ. And opposition merely strengthens our resolve and fuel our prayers.

 And note this about the statement in v. 3: we do not boast about our sufferings—which would be self-glorification, but while in them we boast in God!

 5:5  Because of this invulnerability of Christian hope to the discouragements of temporal sufferings, “hope does not disappoint (us)” (v. 5 NIV). The force of the present tense verb (“does not disappoint”) is also futuristic: this hope, the reality of which we sample by the gifts of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the now, will not disappoint us. The certainty is tasted in the present by the powers and the ministry of God's Holy Spirit within us. Again, Paul's view of the believer's present experience as being “eschatological” is evident: we who believe live already in the experience that hope anticipates. We commune with God face to face. We experience his white-hot love. We know his illumination as we read the scriptures. We are guided and empowered in living.

 5:6-8  In the nick of time Christ died for us.

 With three “still” (Greek ἔτι) clauses, Paul emphasizes the timeliness of Christ's saving death: “while we were still powerless,” “at just (literally, 'still') the right time,” and “while we were still sinners.” In English the word “still”  implies that the condition would end: we would no longer be sinners. In a sense, of course, that is the case here, since by Christ's death our sins are removed. But the fact that we are no longer “sinners” in the sense of condemned ones does not mean that we are sinless in our daily lives.

 Still, it is clear from v. 7 that Paul wishes to stress that—regardless of how good believers become after their new birth—it was not for good people that Jesus died, but for weak, powerless sinners. Jesus himself expressed his goal in these terms, when he told his critics:

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17 NRSV)

It is quite amazing to me how some modern biblical scholars are unable to see that there is no contradiction between God's motive of love and Christ's suffering the penalty of sin on our behalf. Here is an example of such strange reasoning (from John T. Carroll and Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity [1995],  p. 123):

 All of this suggests that Paul doesn't regard the death of Jesus as a vicarious punishment. His theology of the cross lacks a developed sense of divine retribution. Quite the contrary according to such texts as Rom 5:6-8, the death of Christ is the ultimate expression of the boundless love of God: "But God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).

Of course the death of Jesus showed God's boundless love for us lost sinners. What it most definitely does not show is his willingness to leave sin unpunished.

Throughout this section (vv. 1-11) Paul is working with the Jewish interpretive principle “if such is the case, how much the more will such a thing happen.” And remember that his theme in these verses is the peace (or reconciliation) with God that results from Christ's death and resurrection on our behalf. So his sidea, that he repeats several times with minor variations in wording is: If God loved us enough to give his Son to die for us while we were still sinners and enemies, how much more will he bring out salvation to completion throughout our earthly lives and into the Final Kingdom, now that we have been reconciled to him.

5:12-21 Death through Adam, Life Through Christ 

This next section is likely not only to leave most of you a bit confused by the tight logic and the unspoken assumptions, but also asking the question: Why do we need to know this? And why did the believers in the Roman house churches of Paul's day need to know it?

I don't  pretend to have a definitive answer to that second question, although I do have a suspicion what it might be. As for the first question, let's leave that for last, so that we don't leave our study this week without letting God change us for the better.

In the previous chapters Paul has been pursuing several of his purposes for the letter. One of these was to give the believers in Rome a “spiritual gift”, which was an explanation of his “gospel”, which as you know was more than just the “way of salvation.” He wanted them to see how Christianity made sense in the broader picture of God's ages-long revelation in the Old Testament scriptures and centered in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.


A second purpose he pursued was to heal the breach between Jewish and gentile believers in Rome. The first purpose was met by his careful explanations of how “gospel” truths were already in play as early as the lifetime of Abraham, and that the law of Moses which came later was never intended to replace the faith “on-ramp” to righteousness.  The second purpose was met by showing how—each in their own way—both Jews and gentiles failed to honor God the Creator by perfect obedience to his will revealed in the law of Moses and the law of conscience. Thus, Jews and gentiles were brought together by their mutual failure, their mutual lost estate, and their mutual need for the same salvation through faith.

In 5:1-11 Paul follows up the teaching on justification by showing the resulting reconciliation with God that both Jews and gentiles experience. But in vv. 12-21 he takes a new approach to explaining on the basis of Hebrew scriptures the common plight of Jews and gentiles apart from Christ, and the common remedy provided by God. Here the mutuality of the plight is illustrated not by Abraham, but by Adam. This is fitting. Although Paul was able to make a case in chapter 4 that Abraham as an uncircumcised “gentile” believed and was counted righteous, but then accepted circumcision in order to obey God's command and was at once both father of Jews and gentiles by being the “father of all believers”, he can now make the case that both Jews and gentiles share in the experience of he first human being, Adam, since all humans are descended from him.

The common plight is represented by Adam, who was given an explicit command by God and deliberately disobeyed, bringing sin into the world and with it the consequence of death. The death spoken of is both physical and spiritual. Spiritual death is separation from fellowship with God. It is what Paul a few verses before has called being “enemies of God.”

The common remedy is represented by Jesus, who is portrayed here as the Second Adam (or the Last Adam). As the First Adam disobeyed and brought sin and death upon those who were “in” him, i.e., all his descendants, so the Second Adam obeyed (lived a perfect life and died an obedient death) and brought justification (a right standing with God) and life upon those who are “in” him by their faith in him.

As death—complete separation and alienation from God—reigned over all descendants of Adam—Jews and non-Jews—so spiritual life characterized by union and communion with the living God reigns over all believers in Jesus.

And as Paul wraps up this section in vv. 20-21, he ties together a loose end that became obvious when in v. 14 he said that death reigned from Adam to Moses. How does the law of Moses fit in? That law was “added” for the Jewish part of Adam's race in order to raise awareness of the magnitude of human sinfulness. Where there is no law (i.e., no explicit command), there can be no “trespass.” But don't fret, my fellow Jews—Paul writes—for where more sins result from greater knowledge of God's perfect will, there is always even greater grace available from God. That grace—only dimly seen in the Hebrew scriptures in the sacrificial system—is now clearly revealed in Jesus. 

Paul was writing for his Roman audience. But the Holy Spirit through Paul was writing for believers of all time.

So what do the truths in this chapter have to do with you and me? If you have put your faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you enjoy the peace of God and complete access to the Father at every moment of every day. But do you make use of this glorious privilege? Do you let matters beyond your control, like the Stock Market's fluctuations or the weather cause you to fret and worry? Do you allow them to dominate your thoughts to the extent that you are not free to think of others' needs? How about that neighbor with young children who needs short-term child care? What about the lonely widow down the street? Does a shut-in who lives near you need his walk or driveway cleared in winter? Can you do shopping for someone? Literally hundreds of opportunities come our way daily to help others, but all too often our preoccupation with our own needs blinds us to them.

 If Adam is our common ancestor, we not only share the common problem of sin, but also the common available remedy in Jesus who is our Second Adam. And this goes for everyone. We shouldn't be afraid to share the good news of Jesus with associates, even if they are of faiths that seem to us remote: Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, but also nearer faiths such as Judaism and—dare I say it?—nominal Christianity. Having been raised in a Christian church does not mean being born again by faith in Jesus. All the richness of blessing of salvation comes to us as the children of Adam—Adam who failed, but who necessitated the Last Adam, Jesus.