“For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. 11 And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.”
By way of introduction I’m going to do something that would probably incur the ire of my homiletics professors. But, they are all with the Lord now so they have to forgive me.
I’m going to go outside of our text, and you don’t have to turn there because I’m only going to refer to the specific wording of one verse and make some comments about it for the sake of laying the groundwork for our study today.
Listen to John’s Gospel, chapter 13, verse 1
“Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.”
When John wrote that Jesus loved His own who were in the world and loved them to the end, in saying ‘the end’ he did not mean to convey the idea that something was ceasing to be, or that the duration or extent of something had run out – like coming to the end of a stretched-out rope.
John was communicating to his readers that the love of Christ for those who are His in this world was manifested, demonstrated, to the utmost degree.
In the historical sense that is what was about to happen after the disciples had their last Passover meal with the Master. He would be arrested, he would endure the mock trials and the torture at the hands of evil men, and then He would die for them.
This was the end, or the full manifestation of His love for them, says John. He loved them in His teaching, He loved them in His miracles, He loved them with His life, now He would demonstrate God’s own love for them – and for us who are His in this world – in His death.
It is the doctrinal teaching behind this statement of John’s that Paul laid out for us in Romans 5. I wanted to begin this way however, because it is so easy to go straight to these portions of Paul’s letters, specifically Romans, and get caught up in the teaching of the doctrines of Christianity, breaking down words, explaining theology, and forget the love.
Another potential stumbling point is the one of getting so focused on what was done for us, and what was provided to us, that we forget that this is really about Jesus Christ and God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. It is about the relationship of the eternal Triune God, and the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son for the ultimate glory of God.
It is our natural tendency, you know; to make things about us and focus on us and our benefits. I had to fight that temptation as I began to study and meditate on this sermon.
I caught myself thinking about all these things the Apostle says about us and realized that Paul is really teaching about the love of God demonstrated in and through His Christ.
Yes, there is much to teach about the sinful condition of mankind and the death that was overcome at the cross and the life that comes to us in the Spirit by the Grace of God alone through faith alone in the atoning work of Christ alone.
And we must learn those things, and we can and should rejoice in the Father’s great love for us, demonstrated through His Son.
But as we study these verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and we will go there in a moment, let’s be reminded first that ‘having loved His own who were in this world, He loved them (us) to the uttermost’. He loved in His teaching, in His miracles, in His life, and then to the farthest degree that anyone can love, He loved us in His death.
Let me interject one more thing here before we go on just to prepare you for the nature of this study today. Those who have been under my teaching know that I am not inclined to resort often to jokes or tear-jerking stories about puppies on railroad tracks or other shallow and emotion-evoking illustrations for my sermons.
Today will be even more than usually, an unpacking of the text in a classroom type atmosphere, because what you need to learn and know is said better here by Paul than I could ever make it with a plethora of extemporaneous information and illustrations. So I encourage you to keep your Bible open to Romans 5 and follow the text as we expound these phrases and with the Holy Spirit’s direction soak in their depths.
JUSTIFIED
Now coming to these verses of our study the first thing I want to draw to your attention is the usage of the past tense in speaking of what Christ has done and the status of believers as concerns their acceptance with God and their eternal place.
Going back to that passage in John’s Gospel, John said that having loved, Jesus loved to the end.
Here in Romans 5 even at the beginning of the chapter we read “…having been justified by faith, we have…” In verse 2 Paul says “we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand”. In verse 5 he says “…the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us”.
Then when we come to verses 6 through 11 we see that while we were, Christ did. And throughout, we are getting this signal that everything is done already; done and unchangeable. Just go through quickly and pick up on the words in their past tense.
Justified, saved, reconciled, received… it is important for us to know, fellow Christ-followers, that in the economy of our eternal God all is done and fixed forever for the Spirit-filled believer in Him.
There are only two references to the future in this passage, and both of them have to do with our salvation. In verse 9 we ‘shall be saved’ and in verse 10 we ‘shall be saved’. There is a clarification to be made about those phrases, which we will get to before we’re done.
So as you go through and read these things that were done in love and that were provided in love, that in the perfect love of the Godhead were determined in eternity and carried out in history, it is finished for you and for me and it will be as true for you tomorrow and for all your tomorrows as it was the moment Jesus cried triumphantly from Calvary’s cross, ‘It is finished!’
Now there is so much in just these 6 verses of our study that we could easily get bogged down and never finish.
So to stay on track today I’ve gone through and picked out what I’ve seen as four key terms in this passage, and I think if we focus on those everything will fall into place for us.
The first word then, is ‘justified’. We see that up in verse 1, which I referred to a few minutes ago. Having been justified by faith. And we see it again in verse 9.
That word has to do with God’s reckoning, or His declaration concerning the believer in Christ, that he or she is in right standing before God, not by any merit of their own, but because of the shed blood of Christ.
Justification is a work of God whereby He declares a person to be righteous, that is, right with Him by His grace alone, through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone.
What we need to see in relation to this today is that while in verse 9 Paul repeats this term, saying that we have been justified by His blood, he has already established in verse 6 that Christ died for the ungodly. Now it’s important that we put these two words together and understand this amazing contrast.
We were ungodly. That means that we were without God. Paul did not use the word in the loose sense that people in our day and age use it; glibly referring to the weather as ‘ungodly’ or some set of uncomfortable circumstances being ‘ungodly’, or the barren terrain of a desert region being ungodly.
No, he meant that mankind in sin and apart from God, or as he said in another letter to one of the churches, ‘without hope and without God in the world’, is ungodly.
‘For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.’ So we were without God, and we were helpless.
We were helpless to do anything about our sinful condition, we were helpless to do anything about the fact that we were without God, we were helpless to change ourselves into anything deserving of God or of His mercy.
Now this is a very fundamental truth that must be taught and not neglected. It very much goes against our nature as humans and especially as fallen, sinful humans, to recognize and admit that we are helpless. We want to do it ourselves. We don’t want help and if help comes we will often refuse it until we realize we can’t make it on our own.
I don’t think I need to take time to illustrate that for you. We have all seen it, especially most of us who have had children or even studied the behavior of children. They want to do everything on their own until they fail so many times they get frustrated and either sit and cry, or give in and say to a parent or another sibling, ‘ok, now I need your help’
On the one hand, on a purely human level, that can be a good thing. When my children were small I encouraged them to keep trying and not give up, only helping them when it became obvious to them and me that my help was absolutely necessary. I wanted them to develop independence in that way. But that same desire in the nature of most people, to be independent, unfortunately keeps them from submission to Christ, and even in Christians, often is a hindrance to fully understanding the doctrine of God’s sovereign election because they just can’t accept that they had no part whatsoever in their regeneration and their salvation. That is a teaching for another time.
So I’ll just move on to the second thing and point out that we were without God. We were not only helpless, but ungodly.
Yet here is the demonstration of the audacity of the ungodly heart; people will presume to declare that they can come to God when they want to and under their own set conditions,
I will believe in God when He shows me such and such. I will begin to serve God in earnest when my children are grown and out of the house and I have more time. I’ll surrender to God or I’ll believe in God when I can see this or that proof.
I have actually had one foolish young man tell me that he didn’t want to give up his present life of sin, but his plan was to accept Christ on his death bed so that he wouldn’t miss out on the fun things in life, but would still go to heaven.
Such audacity! We were without God. We were ungodly – and we were absolutely helpless, as helpless as a dead man is helpless to change his circumstances in any way – and while we were in this hopeless condition, Christ died for us, and by His shed blood purchased our peace with God so that the Father could declare us right with Him, that is justify us, and yet remain just, in that His Son died that He might bring us to the Father and make us His.
We were ungodly, He brought us to God.
We were helpless, so He did it all. Jesus brought us to God. You have to understand this my friends, or your sin nature will continue to keep you under the deception that you have come to God by some goodness within you, or some power that exists in you to come to Him by your choosing.
You did not, you could not. While you were helpless and ungodly, Jesus died for you and justified you by His grace.
How is it that the shed blood of Jesus brings us to the Father in justification? Well, that involves our next key word.
LOVED
It is the word ‘love’. Verse 8 says that God’s own love for us was demonstrated. When was it demonstrated? Well, the demonstration of God’s love came while we were helpless and sinners.
Yes, sinners. That is a word that people don’t want to hear any more. They are so opposed and so openly scornful of hearing that word applied to them that many church leaders are tempted – and succumb to that temptation – to leave it out of their vocabulary and out of their pulpits and in many cases even cut it out of their theology. But it is still true. It has never not been true since the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden.
All mankind was in the loins of Adam when he sinned and therefore all inherited the sin nature.
Sin means to be diametrically opposed to holiness. You may have heard that the word in the original language refers to missing the mark as might be used of an archer who misses the target with his arrow.
But it is not as though the arrow is slightly off center or even hitting the outer border of the target itself.
If you want an accurate mental picture of what the word sin means, think of an archer facing a target which is down range, then picture that archer doing an about face, that is, turning until his back is to the target, and shooting in the opposite direction.
We are so opposed to God that we are backwards in every way. We cannot think like God, we cannot understand God, in fact we cannot even have a right thought about God apart from the life that comes from above and the enlightenment of His Holy Spirit in us and to us.
So we were helpless and ungodly, but worse than that, we were in rebellious disobedience and incapable of having any right thought about God or any desire to either seek Him or know Him, and while we were in that condition, Christ died for us.
I want you to notice how this narrative of Paul’s is going from the general to the personal. First he says that Christ died for the helpless ungodly, then he says Christ died for the sinful us.
Helpless… those without God.
Sinful… us.
First he uses the general term, ‘ungodly’, then the specific and personal term, ‘us’. We were the ungodly he spoke of, now he’s just bringing it home by saying ‘us’. First he says ‘helpless’, then he says ‘sinners’. Do you hear it?
Now here is where that first reference to the future comes in. Verse 9 says that having been (past tense) justified by His blood, we shall be (future) saved from the wrath of God through Him.
That is a future reference. The wrath of God is coming on this world. It is to be poured out on a sinful, rebellious world and you may read about it in the book of Revelation. Here, Paul assures us that we are saved from that wrath – that is, the believer will not be touched or affected by the circumstances of God’s wrath when it comes upon this sinful world, because having been justified by the blood of His Son, we are saved and we will be saved. The Christ-follower will never suffer the wrath of God against sin, because the burden of his sin was carried by Christ to the cross, where God condemned sin in the flesh of His son.
Helpless, we were; ungodly; sinful; born under wrath, dead and deserving of death, but Christ died for the ungodly. Christ died for us. We are saved to God and we will be saved from the wrath to come.
See the words ‘much more’ at the beginning of verse 9? Paul simply means this. If God was willing to send His Son to shed His blood and die – if Jesus was willing to come to this world and suffer and shed His own blood and die to pay the penalty for the sin of those who were – and while they were – helpless ungodly sinners, and by so doing make them His own, purchased back, bought with a price, how much more, now that they are His purchased ones, will He keep them from the wrath to come?
Let me put it another way. There is no double jeopardy with God. ‘Double jeopardy’ means more than it does on the game show. It means to be tried twice for the same crime. I won’t go into the detail of that law, but here is what I mean by applying that term here today.
If Christ has paid for your sin then you will not pay for it. It is paid for. If Christ suffered the wrath of God in His body on the cross, you will not suffer that wrath, for it has already been suffered for you.
God’s love is demonstrated in this, that even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. By saying He died for us we mean ‘in our place’. He was our substitute; our substitutionary sacrifice for the penalty of sin. Having loved those who were His in this world, He loved them to the uttermost.
RECONCILED
The next key word I picked out is ‘reconciled’.
Now what exactly does that word mean? Here is a simple dictionary definition.
“To restore to friendship or harmony”. That’s Merriam Webster’s Dictionary definition #1. To restore to fellowship or harmony.
Now here is what makes that definition so significant in the case of our relationship to God.
We didn’t have a relationship.
We were not only helpless sinners who did not have God, we were enemies.
Do you know what enemies do? They fight. They hate. They oppose one another. When you think about being God’s enemy, and He being your enemy, shouldn’t it be a little disconcerting to think about who is going to win that war?
When Jesus spoke of Himself as the stone which the builders rejected, in Matthew 21, He warned, “…he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust”.
In other words, whether you come against God or He comes against you, you’re not going to be the winner.
We in our sin nature are enemies of God. It is as though we’ve taken up arms against Him. We were helpless and without God in the world; worse yet, we were rebellious sinners, disobedient and backwards. But worst of all, we were His sworn enemies. But thanks be to God for His marvelous grace… while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.
Now let’s talk some more about that word ‘reconciled’.
Usually when we talk about two people being reconciled to one another we have a picture of two people who have been at odds with one another after having been together in some relationship. Either they were married, or they worked together, or they were partnered in some ministry connected with the church, or perhaps they were just good friends who had a falling out.
Adam had a relationship with God and it was a good one. God walked with Adam in the cool of the day. They enjoyed sweet fellowship together. When Adam sinned he broke that fellowship and the relationship was destroyed.
As a result, no one born of Adam’s race since has had a relationship with God. We began in sin. We were born spiritually dead and without hope and without God in the world. You didn’t at some point become a sinner because you sinned; you first sinned because you were born a sinner – with a sin nature.
What Christ did in His death was to appease the Father’s just and holy wrath against sin. It is not as though He brought us to the Father and said, “Now everyone shake hands, let bygones be bygones and let’s all get along”.
We had no part or power in the process. We had no hope and no strength. We were God’s sworn enemies. But Christ, in His atoning death, reconciled us to God. Even while we were His enemies He did this.
So the picture, rather than the bringing of two people together and coaxing them to kiss and make up, is of Jesus by His death paying the price in full so that He could justly bring us to the Father and we could be received by God into His presence with no debt to pay, nothing for which He must reject us or hold us guilty.
He didn’t reconcile us and God together, He reconciled us to God. And here is where that second future tense word comes in.
Much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
If God had the desire and the power to redeem us in the first place, even while were His enemies, through the death of His son, How much more does He have the desire and the power to keep us redeemed; to keep us saved, now that we are His friends, by the life of His Son?
And in saying ‘we shall be saved’, Paul simply means that while we enjoy our present salvation through belief in what we cannot see, in the end we will see what we have believed. We will be glorified. There will be no more pain or crying or sickness or death, and our salvation will be complete.
Why not? If the Savior could save us by His death, how much more can He preserve us eternally by His life?
Now we come to the final key word:
REJOICING
Paul says “And not only this”. If you think about this as you read through this entire 5th chapter you will see the term ‘much more’ used 4 times, and in verse 20 the reference to grace abounding ‘all the more’, and again here in verse 11, ‘and not only this’, you can compare it to the merchandise hawker Billy Mays who passed away suddenly not long ago.
He used to advertise a product in his commercials and then with a loud, excited voice declare, ‘But wait! There’s more!’ And here an excited Paul is declaring one blessing on top of another, and with each one adding, ‘but wait, there’s more!’
Christ justified us by His blood. Much more, we will be saved from wrath through Him.
Christ reconciled us to God through His death. Much more, we will be saved by His life.
But wait, there’s more! We also exult in God! We rejoice in God!
How is that an exciting thing? Because we were His sworn enemies! We were at odds with the rock upon which a man is broken to pieces, but when it falls crushes that man to powder. But now through Christ we rejoice in Him.
We feared Him…or should have if we didn’t. We feared the wrath to come and rightly so. We had no options open to us. We were children of wrath destined for a devil’s hell and we were without hope and without God in the world. But now…
…we rejoice in God! We needn’t fear Him any longer. We needn’t fear death, or wrath or hell or separation from God because through His Son we are reconciled, and having been reconciled we have His life, and now rather than fear and despair and alienation we have rejoicing!
Listen to the way JB Phillips paraphrases verse 11
“Nor, I am sure, is this a matter of bare salvation – we may hold our heads high in the light of God’s love because of the reconciliation which Christ has made.”
It isn’t just a matter of being rescued by the skin of our teeth. It means salvation to the fullest and a full and abundant entry into God’s love and grace because of what Christ has done.
Christians, in this world it seems the only time we see someone holding their head high any more is when they are glorying in their own sin. Prideful, arrogant, defiant, they hold their head high out of self-pride and self-satisfaction for their successful bullying in business or successful avoidance of consequences for their sinful behavior. Seldom do we witness those around us, and certainly in the church, walking with head held high and with a bounce in their step for their knowledge and understanding of what God in Christ has done for His glory and for our eternal good.
If Christ-followers would study God’s Word and ask the Holy Spirit for His divine and supernatural light in their lives to understand what is meant by all these ‘much mores’ and ‘abounded all the more’s and ‘and not only this’es, we would see a lot more heads being held high, and hear a lot more rejoicing from God’s chosen people, as they rejoice in God through their Lord Jesus Christ, through whom they have received this reconciliation.
Now as I promised in the beginning, I haven’t filled this with illustrations and stories I found on the internet and I haven’t attempted to entertain you with funny quips or colorful language. But you should be excited at this point. You should be pumped!
Are you? Aren’t you? Have you understood the message here today that is so significant to your peace of mind and heart and your eternal well-being?
You were helpless, ungodly sinners, and enemies against God and could only demonstrate enmity. You could only manifest that which is born of sin and the putrefaction that accompanies death.
And while in that state, in that condition, unable and un-desiring of change, God demonstrates His own love toward you in that Christ died for us! He died for you! He shed His blood to appease the Father’s wrath against sin and ushered you into this grace in which you stand.
It was as though the Father spoke to the Son, and said, ‘These people are deserving of eternal separation from Me because they have sinned and in acting justly I must condemn them forever. But I love them and I want to redeem them. Will you pay the penalty for their sin acting as their substitute so that I can remain just and yet be reconciled to them and declare them justified to stand before Me clean?’ And the Son said, ‘Yes, Father, I love them also and I will, by My death, reconcile them back to you, and by the power of My endless life give them life so that I may present them to you without spot or blemish. And by this grace we will demonstrate our love for them, and by this will You be glorified.”
And at the appointed moment, Christ died for the ungodly. Having loved His own who were in the world, He came Himself into the world and loved them to the uttermost.
If you have never considered the claims of Christ – if you have never heard this good news before and appropriated to yourself the gift of salvation offered to you by God’s grace through His Son Jesus Christ, then today is the day. Today is the day for you to come to Him for the life He has to give.
Christians, today is the day for you to begin, if you never have before, to exalt in God – to rejoice in God, through your Lord Jesus Christ, who has loved you to the uttermost and freely, by His grace, brought you the reconciliation.
