Free from the Wrath of God: United with Adam & Christ, Romans 5:1-21

Romans 5:1-11  (Brant Bryan)

“Since we have been justified through faith” sounds great, but how certain can we, your readers, be Paul?  How solid is my salvation?  And, what happens when I sin after God makes me righteous?  Does that mess up the whole thing?

  
Paul starts and ends this section using legal terms like “justified” and “reconciled” to make clear that we are in a state of justification.  The tenses he uses even show that these weren’t one time events, but have a continuing action.  Paul wants to make clear that we didn’t just have a moment of salvation or an event of salvation, but rather we have moved to a whole new realm.  And, in this realm we have a new set of rules.  We might understand it by imagining that all of a sudden we moved to one of those places we read about in fantasy books – a place like Middle Earth, or Hogwarts, or Dunder-Mifflin.  A place where the rules of life are different, different actions and actors exist, and our actions may have different consequences than they normally do. 

Paul is telling us that everything has changed.  We have been saved from the realm of Wrath and are now under the power of God’s love. 

Love is such a powerful word.  God’s love is the centerpiece of these verses.  Paul tells us that God loves us so much, Christ died for us, even though we were full of problems, sinning and downright ugly (v8).  Why God loves such an unlovely person is beyond my understanding, but he does.  Even better, now God has put his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (v5).  How powerful is that!  Now I have the capacity to love like God does – a love for the unlovely, a love that is sacrificial, a love that is truly unselfish.  It makes me wonder why I don’t use that power more than I do.

 
Looking through this section, it is amazing how many positive things that now come to us that Paul mentions here.  We have peace (v1).  We have access to grace (v2).  We have hope (v2).  We can rejoice in our troubles (v3) because we know that our troubles can work to make us better and eventually give us even more hope (v4).  And, God has even put his loving nature inside us (v5).  Again, Paul is saying everything has changed for us.  It’s almost like hearing a Joel Osteen sermon.   

Paul ends this section by pointing out that if God loved us enough to reach out to us and reconcile us to him while we were his enemies, he has already done the hardest part.  Now he brings us life and joy (vs10-11).  That’s good news.   

Romans 5:12-21 (Casey Cooke)

      In this passage Paul is trying to make a comparison between Adam and Jesus.  He explains how Adam, one man, brought sin into the World and consequently death; Jesus, one man, brought salvation into the World and with it life. 

     The Jewish people looked at sin and death as one in the same.  To sin is to die, and death is to be totally separated from God.  The Jews tried to be free from sin by clinging to the law and following all the rules.  The law became an impossible standard that no one could live up to. 

      The Jews thought that the law was the only way to escape sin, but Paul was trying to explain to them that before the law, sin was still prevalent and punishable by God.  The law was put in place to explain what sin is, but it also held the Jews accountable for their sin.  There was no way for the Jews to outrun their inevitable sinfulness. 

      Paul then brought up that if death can have dominion as a result of one man’s sins (Adam), then surely Christ, one man, can conquer sin as well.  Paul explains that through Christ the law has been removed, and man is not held accountable for his sins because the sins have been atoned for by the death of Jesus and been forgiven. 

      I think the point Paul is trying to make to the Jews is that if you do as Adam did (sin), even with the law, it will lead to death (separation from God), but if you follow Jesus, where the law has been removed, then sin is also removed because of the grace of God.