Standing In Grace Series

3. Boldness and Confidence

That aforementioned verses from Hebrews obviously deal with prayer. This suggests that, although Romans 5:2a is not speaking explicitly about prayer, all this obviously has bearing on our right to approach God in prayer and receive things from him.

Besides, we are encouraged in this thinking by the fact that one of the key words of Romans 5:2a, “access” (prosagoge), occurs in two other passages in the New Testament and that each of these has to do with prayer. Both are in Ephesians.

The first is Ephesians 2:18: “For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

And the second is Ephesians 3:12: “In whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.”

These passages teach two things about prayer, which are based on the fact that we have been given access to God the Father through his work of justification.

First, our access to God is direct. By this I mean that we do not need human mediators in order to have access to God. Of course, we do need to have access to the Father through the one true Mediator, Jesus Christ. He has opened the door to the Father, and given us access to the Father once and forever.

This truth is taught in Ephesians 2:18. It comes at the end of a paragraph in which Paul has been referring to the barriers that once divided men and women from God and from each other.

In the Jewish temple, to which he refers, there were walls designed to protect the approach to God. If you were to have approached the Temple Mount in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus Christ, you would have been confronted with a wall that divided the Courtyard of the Gentiles from what lay beyond. That wall meant what it said. No Gentile could go beyond it, and the penalty for violating the sanctity of the inner courtyard was death. Even the Romans upheld this penalty, and there were signs placed in warning, two of which have since been discovered and are in museums.

Jews could go forward. But even Jewish worshipers would soon come to a second wall. This wall divided the Courtyard of the Women from the Courtyard of the Men. Here all Jewish women had to stop.

Beyond that was still another wall, and past it only Jewish priests could go. They could perform the sacrifices and enter the Holy Place of the temple. But here there was a final barrier, the great curtain that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place. Beyond that barrier only one person could ever go, and that was the High Priest, who could enter only on the Day of Atonement to present the blood of the sacrifice that had been offered for the sins of the people moments before in the outer courtyard.

That elaborate system taught that the way to God was barred even for the elect people of Israel. God could be approached, but only through the mediation of the priests. Gentiles were without access at all, unless they first became Jews and approached by the Jewish route of priestly mediation.

But now, says Paul, those dividing walls of partition have been broken down, and the reason is that when Jesus died, God removed the ultimate barrier, the curtain that divided the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place.