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§12 The Transforming Love of God (Rom. 5:1–11)

Romans 5:1–11 is a victorious passage. “In the whole Bible there is hardly another chapter which can equal this triumphant text,” said Luther (Epistle to the Romans, p. 72). It is like a mountain pass from which one revels in scenery after having labored through the inclines and switchbacks of argumentation in the earlier chapters. The view cannot be fully appreciated without the effort it took to get there.

Commentators are divided whether the passage is the conclusion of Paul’s argument so far or the beginning of a new section. On the one hand, the passage concludes much of what has been said before. Previous themes, in particular those of righteousness, boasting, wrath, grace, hope, glory, and blood, culminate here. But, on the other hand, new terms are introduced, most notably that of reconciliation. Moreover, various themes of chapter 5 will be developed in succeeding chapters; in particular, 5:1–11 is elaborated in chapters 6–8, and (to a lesser extent) 5:12–21 in chapters 9–11. Evidently, therefore, 5:1–11 is not exactly an end or a beginning, but a bridge between two distinct phases of Paul’s argument. It is like the overlapping ends of a carpenter’s folding rule: the justifying act of Christ is recapitulated and the justified life is introduced; the work of reconciliation is reviewed and the life of righteousness is anticipated.

The structure of 5:1–11 falls into three units. First, Christ’s work of reconciliation ushers the believer into a condition of righteousness, characterized by peace and hope (vv. 1–5). The condition of righteousness is then shown in verses 6–8 to rest on the death of Christ, the supreme expression of God’s reconciling love. Finally, in addition to effecting reconciliation, the death of Christ guarantees future salvation and eschatological hope (vv. 9–11). Paul begins (v. 1) and ends (v. 11) with the idea that the believer’s hope and life are rooted in “God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Thus, the magnalia Dei, the mighty acts of God, are encompassed within the work of Jesus Christ.

No less remarkable than the triumphant content of this section is its tone. In order to establish the truth of righteousness by faith Paul had to build his case on logical argumentation demonstrated by proofs and examples from Scripture. But guarded reasoning from both Scripture and history now yields to inner confidence and the certainty of salvation in the present and future. Shifting to the first person, Paul raises the voice of the justified sinner to hymnic heights. A greater contrast between 1:18f. and 5:1f. could not be imagined. The desperate straits of the sinner have been transformed to peace and reconciliation with God. “The night is far gone, the day is at hand” (13:12, RSV).

5:1 / Therefore, since we have been justified through faith. Everything Paul has said in the last four chapters has paved the way for this exclamation. The aorist passive tense of “justified” (Gk. dikaiōthentes) means an accomplished condition, something which is finished as opposed to something pending or in progress. Verse 1 resounds with this decisive note and new train of thought: the problem of sin has been resolved by the death of Christ, and sinners, like Abraham, stand in a new relationship with God. They have been justified through faith, and, as Paul says in verse 2, they “have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.” Justification is access to grace, as a consequence of which the believer is no longer under wrath but has peace with God. A variant tradition in verse 1 (noted in the NIV) reads, “let us have peace with God,” thus exhorting the reader to fulfill or enter into the condition established by Christ. Although this reading claims the stronger support among the ancient manuscripts, it remains the weaker reading. Internal evidence suggests that Paul’s original wording was not an exhortation but an indicative, we have peace with God. In general when Paul speaks of peace between humanity and God it is God who effects it. This is exactly his point in verse 10 where “God’s enemies … were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.” Peace, like justification, comes exclusively from God. Both conditions depend on God’s action; neither is something humanity can bring on itself.

There are important practical implications of this truth. Nearly all Christians confess that Christ’s death effects salvation, but not infrequently they try (perhaps unconsciously) to live the Christian life on their own. Both righteousness as the act of saving and peace as the condition of being saved, however, come through our Lord Jesus Christ. The Christian life is from Alpha to Omega a life of faith, and the progress of the new life is as much a part of God’s grace as was Christ’s death for the sinner in the first place.

When Paul speaks of peace with God he means virtually the same thing as being a “new creation” (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17). The English word “peace” has a variety of meanings, not all of which are compatible with Paul’s understanding of the term. The expressions “peaceful coexistence,” or “peace and quiet,” for instance, connote absence of conflict, whereas “peace of mind” implies contentment. In the Bible, however, peace is neither the absence of adversity nor a sensation of euphoria. The Hebrew šālôm, normally rendered in the Greek OT by eirēnē, means a condition in which life can best be lived. A review of this common OT word reveals that it seldom refers to a purely inner peace, whether psychological or emotional. Especially in the prophetic literature peace is a condition established by God which characterizes the age to come. The triumphant assertion in 5:1 claims that the long-awaited peace of the future has dawned in Jesus Christ. There is a certainty in Paul’s expression uncharacteristic of rabbinic authors. As the sinner in 1:18ff. stood in a condition of hostility to God, and thereby under wrath, so now, having been justified by faith, the believer stands in a condition free from obstacles in his or her relationship with God. In neither case does Paul say how the individual may have felt in those conditions, which means that wrath and salvation are not subjective human experiences but decrees of God. Verses 9–10 describe the condition as one of reconciliation instead of hostility. When one is at peace with God, for the first time one fulfills one’s purpose with God, others, and the world.

Peace with God, therefore, is neither anesthetic bliss nor the repose of a graveyard. The removal of sin, like the removal of an obstruction from one’s windpipe, restores one’s vital signs. The life of peace is not a life free from adversity; neither do adverse circumstances necessarily threaten the believer’s peace with God. In verses 3–5 and 10 Paul speaks of struggle and suffering in the Christian life. The life of faith may indeed create adversity, but adversity is not necessarily a sign of divine judgment or abandonment. In faith, adversity may be a sign of life, just as exercise brings sore muscles in a person who has been bedridden. In chapter 3 we spoke of the forensic or legal connotations of righteousness, whereby a judge, who may not know a defendant or ever see that person again, declares the sinner righteous. Paul now moves beyond that official metaphor. If justification produces release for the prisoner, peace is the life of freedom. If justification results from the crack of a gavel, peace results from the outstretched hand of a Father, drawing the estranged child into a new experience of freedom and hope.

5:2 / The prepositional phrase through whom reinforces the pivotal importance of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. The Greek word for access, prosagōgē, carries the solemn sense of being granted an audience with a monarch or afforded unhindered access into God’s presence (cf. Eph. 2:18; 3:12). The verbal form of the word prosagō, for example, occurs numerous times in the LXX with reference to bearing sacrifices to the altar or entering the Holy of Holies. The verbs gained and stand are also instructive. Both are in the perfect tense in the Greek, meaning that their effect began in the past at the point of faith and continues into the present. Moreover, stand carries the sense of something firm and lasting, the opposite of a short-term, fair-weather relationship with God. To stand in grace is to possess a footing and anchor from God which is able to withstand all opposition to the life of faith.

Here, and again in verses 3 and 11, we encounter that vintage Pauline word, “to boast” (rejoice), occurring in various forms 55 times in Paul, but only four times elsewhere in the NT. Normally, Paul regards boasting as an expression of pride, the flaunting of the sinner’s independence of God. On rare occasions, however (and this is one of them), Paul employs the term positively of boasting not in self but in God (Jer. 9:24; 1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17). To fail to rejoice in God is to rob him of glory (1:21), whereas turning to God in faith renders him rightful glory (4:20) and promises the hope of the glory of God. Christians are able to take courage in present afflictions because they know that the present reality is not the final reality. This passage sets the believer’s sights confidently on the future where God’s glory will overcome sin and pain, where “what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor. 5:4). The Christian’s hope is that of being a participant in God’s very nature (2 Pet. 1:4), for “when he appears, we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).

5:3–5 / It is one thing to be a Christian with the wind at one’s back. How frequently the Christian life is depicted as a state of insulation and ease, where believers are supposedly endowed with some sort of “executive clemency” from the knocks of life. Increasingly in our day the Christian life is depicted in terms of triumphalism and success.

Paul, however, says that the believer must learn to rejoice not only in the future hope of glory, but also in our sufferings. This is a paradox, because sufferings and afflictions appear to deliver us up to death, not to glory. But for Paul faith enables sufferings and afflictions to aid God’s grace, not oppose it. Throughout salvation history human suffering plays an unavoidable and necessary role of identification with God’s way in the world. David confesses that God does not lead him around the valley of the shadow of death, but through it (Ps. 23:4). Suffering is the necessary prelude to the exaltation of the Servant of Yahweh (Isa. 52:13–53:12). The Lord of Glory himself suffered a violent and ignominious death on the cross. The apostle Paul’s witness to his faith led to such persecution that he could have written a guide to the jails of the Roman world. Suffering is an essential part of the Christian’s identification with the fate and work of Christ. Paul was not an exponent of a health and wealth gospel. He knew firsthand that the Christian life is one of “conflicts on the outside, fears within” (2 Cor. 7:5; see his list of hardships in 2 Cor. 11:32ff.). He knew that suffering, loathsome as it is, strips away false securities and drives believers to God, the source of all hope and compassion. He knew, bewildering as it may seem, that hardships and sufferings were necessary to prepare believers for the weight of glory prepared for them (2 Cor. 4:16–18).

In verses 3–4 he presents the consequences of suffering as a chain reaction: we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. The Greek word for perseverance is a compound of “under” and “remain,” meaning the ability to endure, or staying power. The word for character is found nowhere in Greek literature prior to Paul, and appears to be unique to him. It means the quality of being approved after testing, or character, and hence the distinguishing attribute of the mature individual. The Greek word is a contrastive word play with the “depraved mind” (Gk. adokimon) of 1:28 which leads to wrath and the mature character here (Gk. dokimē) which leads to salvation. Hope, which both begins (v. 2) and ends (vv. 4–5) the sequence, means to live by the promises of God. The stimulus to this chain reaction is faith. That is to say, Paul does not here provide us with a fail-safe formula for virtue. By itself tribulation does not necessarily produce perseverance; it often produces bitterness and resignation, and hardship may simply produce hardness instead of character. Perseverance, character, and hope are marks of grace, and they develop only where the believer stands justified before God and responds to them in faith.

Especially important is Paul’s statement that hope does not disappoint us (v. 5). The Greek word for disappoint, kataischynein, is a cognate of the same word in 1:16, “I am not ashamed (epaischynein) of the gospel.” It recalls, despite everything to the contrary, that the believer’s trust in the gospel is no empty fantasy. The Jewish Christian concept of hope dwarfs the ancient Greek idea of hope. For the Greek hope was little more than an eventuality, a possible outcome of current circumstances. But for Jews and Christians hope is anchored to the person and promises of God. Käsemann captures the distinction well, “[Hope] is no longer in Greek fashion the prospect of what might happen but the prospect of what is already guaranteed” (Romans, p. 134).

Hope is also tempered by the fires of adversity, but again only through faith. Apart from faith, hope is the opiate of a false and bitter illusion. But apart from love, hope has no basis. God has poured out his love into our hearts, says Paul (v. 5). The original Greek reads “in our hearts” (not into our hearts), implying that the Holy Spirit is already active in the hearts of believers. God is not a big brother dispensing miserly increments of goodwill to his minions. God is a compassionate Father who literally pours out his love within us. The Greek word for poured out, ekchein, suggests a lavishness on God’s part, reminiscent, perhaps, of the occasional torrential rains in arid eastern regions. The verb is in the perfect tense, indicating that the gushing forth began at a specific point in the past and continues into the present. The same verb recurs several times in the Acts 2 narrative (vv. 2:17, 18, 33), which may indicate that Paul locates its inception at Pentecost. At any rate, in prophetic literature the outpouring of God’s Spirit was anticipated as the inauguration of the new age, and Paul saw in Christ’s death and resurrection and in the subsequent bestowal of the Holy Spirit the dawning of the eschatological order.

For the first time in Romans Paul mentions the love of God (v. 5). In Christian usage the Greek word for love, agapē, means unconditional love originating solely from the giver and independent of any merit in the recipient. It is not conditional love, love “if”; not earned love, love “because of”; but unwarranted love, love “in spite of.” Verse 10 attests that God expressed his love in Christ “when we were God’s enemies.” Ordinarily, to bestow love on a worthless or treacherous person is madness. But God’s love does not justify itself, as Franz Leenhardt notes, by pointing to the value of the beloved object (Romans, pp. 136–37). Neither does it justify itself by reciprocity from the beloved. Rather, God’s love gives that which its object does not possess in itself; its transforming power is its own reason for existence. Jesus commanded his followers to love not because of expected returns, but “in spite of” the apparent worthlessness of the other (Luke 6:32–36). Love is the blueprint for the plan of salvation and the Christian life. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

God’s love is no abstraction. The supreme expression of God’s love is the death of Christ “on our behalf” (vv. 6–8). The love of God, therefore, must be understood objectively rather than subjectively, i.e., as God’s love for us rather than our love for God. Interestingly, Paul does not say “the love of Christ,” as verses 6–8 would suggest. This implies that the crucifixion promotes not the heroism of Jesus, but rather the saving purpose of God to redeem hostile humanity. God’s love is expressly mediated through the Holy Spirit, whom God has given us (v. 5). Paul is not yet prepared to introduce a discussion of the Holy Spirit, which must await chapter 8. He continues rather with the love of God as it was expressed in Christ’s atoning death. Mention of God’s pouring out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit does, however, establish the significant points that God’s love is personal love communicated through the Spirit and that the Spirit is the companion of believers. The verb given, an aorist (past) participle in Greek, indicates that the Holy Spirit has entered the lives of believers at a point in the past (at their justification by faith, v. 1; Gal. 3:2) and continues to abide with them.

5:6–8 / Verses 6–8 present one of the most profound descriptions of divine love found in Scripture. Poor Richard’s Almanack said that “God helps them that help themselves.” That is vintage deism, but it is not biblical Christianity. Romans 5 teaches that God helps them that cannot help themselves. Note Paul’s descriptions of the human condition: when we were still powerless (v. 6), ungodly (v. 6), sinners (v. 8), “God’s enemies” (v. 10). A miserable list of credits if ever there was one! God’s love is not a matching fund bestowed on the worthy. God’s love is love for the undeserving. Christ died for humanity not when it made amends or turned over a new leaf, but for humanity as rebellious sinners (v. 8) and “God’s enemies” (v. 10). This is a shocking thing to realize, indeed quite an offense to moral people who nurse the idea that their goodness is somehow responsible for God’s love. The radical news of the gospel is that Christ died for the godless, which means that God loves the godless. And to say that God loves the godless is to say that God justifies the godless. The offense remains: to say that a person is a sinner is to say that that person is the object of God’s love!

God demonstrated his love at just the right time. Paul was of the conviction (Gal. 4:4; Eph. 1:10; Phil. 2:6f.), as were other NT writers (Mark 1:15; John 1:14; Heb. 9:26), that the Christ-event was no arbitrary happening, but an integral part of the divine economy, the constituent element in the plan of salvation which happened “in the fulness of time,” according to Galatians (4:4), “once for all at the end of the ages,” according to Hebrews (9:26). God did not send his regards to the human race, he did not merely possess noble intentions for the human race, but he did something absolutely without precedent or analogy—God became a human being. The word “incarnation” in Latin literally means “in human flesh,” and the enfleshment of God in Jesus Christ is the supreme manifestation of God’s love (v. 8).

In verse 7 Paul considers the limitlessness of God’s love, a love which, in comparison with human guardedness, must appear utterly profligate. Verses 6–7 are not a little awkward, however. Verse 6 is complicated by a textual variant in Greek. This is followed by a redundancy in verse 7, the first half of which says that death on behalf of a righteous person hardly ever occurs, with the implication that death on behalf of an unrighteous person never occurs. But the second half of the verse continues that death on behalf of a good person is still thinkable. Exactly how we should understand the difference between a righteous and good individual is debatable. Attempts to argue an interpretation of the passage from these two words alone ring a sour note. More plausible is Barrett’s suggestion that Paul, realizing that he overstated the case at the beginning of the verse, attempted to rectify it in the latter half, but that Tertius, his amanuensis (16:22), failed to omit the first statement, thus accounting for the repetitiveness of the verse (Romans, p. 105).

There can be no doubt about Paul’s meaning, however, for verse 8 avers that God’s love is humanly inconceivable. God’s love for the ungodly is greater than human love for the godly. Three times in as many verses Paul includes the little Greek particle eti, “yet” or “still,” driving home that God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice were offered contrary to all expectation, while we were still sinners and enemies. Here is no bloodless essay on “the idea of the good.” Paul speaks of an enactment, a manifestation, a demonstration of divine love in the death of Christ for sinners that has transformed history itself. The German artist Matthias Grünewald (1460[?]–1528) captured something of Paul’s sense in his “Crucifixion.” Dwarfing the mortals who surround him, including John the Baptist who points to him with outstretched finger, Jesus hangs heavy in human agony on the cross as an awesome demonstration of the weight of sin and the magnitude of divine love.

The climax of the passage comes in the final pronouncement, Christ died for us (v. 8). Here is the gospel in four words, a combination of history and theology, event and interpretation. Christ died is a historical statement; for us is a theological interpretation. Both are essential to the gospel. Without theological interpretation Christ’s death becomes a meaningless datum of history; but without history theology evaporates into speculation and idealism. Each word in this confession is a vital tenet of salvation. Not just anyone, not even a very good person, but Christ, who appeared at the right time, died for our salvation.

The Greek text of verses 6–8 contains four sentences, each of which ends with reference to Christ’s death. Thus, when Paul speaks of God’s love, or of righteousness, or of eschatology, he must speak of the cross, for the cross is the constitutive criterion of salvation. Whoever thinks God begrudges the world a pittance of goodwill finds that notion dispelled forever by verse 8. Christ did not die of natural causes. In the face of animosity and rejection he offered his life as a supreme sacrifice for us. The Greek preposition translated for means “on behalf of.” Unlike most prepositions, this one is concrete: Jesus took our place. It is one thing to say Christ died; quite another to say Christ died for me! Thus, Christ died for us is not only the gospel distilled to four words, it is by necessity the personal confession of every Christian.

5:9–11 / Paul’s magisterial exposition of the transforming love of God reaches its apogee in verses 9–11. Paul utilizes a rabbinic comparison from lesser to greater, or from light to heavy, known in Hebrew as qal wāḥômer, the object of which is to inspire confidence that God is utterly trustworthy to complete the work of salvation, for if God’s love delivered Christ to death for sinners, how much more will it save them from his wrath! God has already done the really difficult thing in justifying rebellious sinners; how much more may those who are justified take confidence that God will preserve them in the state of reconciliation. If God delivered Jesus from death, the same God will also deliver believers from sin and death to life, a point Paul reemphasizes in 8:11. Chapter 5 began with the present state of righteousness, but it now shifts boldly to the future: the cross not only forgives past sins, it assures the justified of their future hope and glory.

Paul continues his decisive contrast between God’s will and human resistance, describing unjustified sinners as God’s enemies (v. 10). The story is told that as Henry David Thoreau lay dying he was asked by his sister if he had made peace with God. Thoreau reportedly answered, “I did not know we had argued.” It was a witty reply, but wide of the gospel. Thoreau evidently believed that human nature is basically good, and that apart from a fault here and there God finds little objectionable in the human race. Paul disagrees. Humanity cannot reconcile itself to God. If there is to be reconciliation it must be effected from God’s side, not ours. On our own and apart from grace we are entrenched in rebellion. We are not distant relatives of God; we are insurrectionists against a worthy king (Mark 12:1–12). It took nothing short of the death of God’s Son to persuade humanity to lay down its arms and accept the gift of reconciliation.

The verb tenses in verses 9–11 encompass the entire life of the believer in God’s love: we were God’s enemies, we have been justified, we shall be saved. God’s redeeming love is past, present, and future. In theological terminology Paul is speaking of justification, the act whereby we were made right with God; sanctification, the process by which God renews us according to his purpose; and eschatology, the completion of salvation in the future and the fulfillment of hope. For the present, the believer lives between two worlds, a theme which Paul will develop in chapter 6. Paul refers to the renewed life variously as a race (Phil. 3:12; 1 Cor. 9:24), dying and rising (2 Cor. 4:16), a fight (1 Tim. 1:18; 6:12), a struggle (Rom. 5:3–5), and a battle (Eph. 6:10–20). But in one thing the believer takes confidence: the cross stands as an irrevocable demonstration of God’s faithfulness in the past, and hence believers can trust God for all things in the future. His love is our hope. St. Chrysostom put it thus, “If God gave a great gift to enemies, will he give anything less to his friends?”

The passage concludes with a new term in verses 10–11, reconciliation. Reconciliation is the act whereby God makes the sinner right with himself, thus ushering the justified sinner into real participation in the life of the risen Christ, which is characterized by peace (v. 1) and hope (v. 2). The concept of reconciliation builds a bridge into chapters 6 and 7. Katalassein, “to reconcile,” was rare, if not unknown, in Hellenistic usage, and consequently no more familiar to Paul’s first readers than it may be to us. In writing to the Corinthians Paul used the term with reference to being a “new creation,” meaning first to be reconciled to God, and second, the surrendering of self as an “ambassador of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:16–21). Reconciliation thus carries the double significance of God’s doing something for us and with us.

The parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11–32 wonderfully illustrates reconciling love. Willful and defiant, the younger son demanded his share of the father’s blessing, later to be rudely awakened in the outside world. Returning to his father and expecting what he deserved—censure, humiliation, and (if lucky) probation—the boy received what he did not deserve—shoes, ring, robe, banquet, and most of all, his father’s delight in the infinite worth of one who was lost and now found. Reconciliation is being found by—and surrendering to—the love of God.