Isn’t this all getting just a little too religious? What I mean by that is all this intellectual wrangling with Romans!
It can feel that way, so let’s start with some Psalms. Three beautiful verses: “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you.” 63:1. “Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint.” 64:1. “Praise is due to you.” 65:1. This language is personal and relational. The Psalmist is seeking God, wants God to hear his complaint, and he offers praise to God.
So how does this personal talk all line up with Romans?
It lines up because Romans is about the Gospel. The simple message of the Gospel, which is at just the right time God sent his Son, born of a virgin, to live among us, to teach us, to show us the way to God the Father. He died—in fact was crucified by us and crucified for us— but overcame the worst of evil and rose from the dead, ascended back the Father, and then the Holy Spirit was available to be freely released into the hearts of those who seek God. That is a very personal and relational message.
Paul’s point is simple: Having faith in this Gospel lets those of us who are seeking God to be found by him. He will hear us; even our complaints. He has shown his love throughout all time, but now most fully in Jesus, and this leads us to praise him.
That is Paul’s message, just have faith in Jesus.
How do we receive this message? Sometimes we receive it with the “yeah, buts” coming immediately to mind. You know what I am talking about, the “yeah, but” that starts when something that
seems to begin to lineup, but we may not like how it is lining up, and the questions and rationalization begin to form.
Think about where we have been.
Chapter 1 of Romans deals with the “yeah, but we are not sure there is a God, and some of us just do what we want and others of us want to point out all that is wrong, we want to judge.”
Chapter 2 deals with the “yeah, but aren’t we really good people, we don’t need a savior, do we?”
Chapter 3 deals with the very specific “yeah, but” from the Jewish people, who are saying, “We have a special deal with God, we don’t need this free grace from Jesus, we have the law.”
This list is going on and on, and Paul is remarkably resilient and in some ways patient.
It does sound overly religious, but let me just say that religion can be thought of as a system made by humans to climb up to God. Paul has described in the Gospel the exact opposite. Paul has described that God has climbed down to be with us, his creatures.
Paul has described the Gospel as a relationship with God. All the wrangling Paul is doing is to demonstrate that this relationship comes not from our good works or our heritage but from God, and that is a free gift of grace. Paul is in fact dismantling a religion to let a relationship find its way to us.
Paul quite frankly has been painting an idyllic picture of the people of God. They are standing in grace and rejoicing in glory. Having formerly belonged to Adam, the author of sin and death, they now belong to Christ, the author of salvation and life. At one season in history, the law was added to the people of Israel to intensify the point that humans fall short. And, indeed, as the law showed sin to increase, grace increased all the more. It is a splendid vision of God’s grace. I say, Amen. Others say, yeah, but...
The “yeah, but” we are dealing with today is, “yeah it sounds all good, but Christians still sin.”
Paul as he has concentrated on showing just how secure we are simply through faith, has jumped from accepting God through Jesus all the way to us being perfect in Christ. He has skipped what we might call becoming disciples or growing/maturing in faith. And his critics, those carrying the “yeah, but” signs have jumped on it!
As early as chapter 3 verse 8 we read: “And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.”
If people are hearing, “God’s grace is free—woo-hoo! let’s party” then Paul agrees they have missed the message. In chapter 6, he asks, “are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” (verse 1) and “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under the law but under grace?” (verse 15). His answer to both questions is the same “By no means!”
God’s grace not only forgives sins, but also delivers us from sinning. In verses 1-14 he shows how we are united with Christ and speaks of it as if it is a done deal. In many ways it is because we are made right with God by accepting the free gift, and not by our works. In verses 15-23, however, he implores us not to sin anymore. Not to earn God’s love, but to respond to God’s love so that we might fully live. He shows us that we become slaves to living right lives. Each of these sections could lead me to write pages and pages, but I just want to highlight one point.
We, who follow Jesus, struggle with the reality that we still sin. We read the phrase “we have died to sin” and we misunderstand it. We think that because we are still sinning that we must not have really become Christians. That is pushing the death metaphor too far. The point is that there is a radical discontinuity between our old selves and our new selves. The use of the word death is to highlight this discontinuity and, in fact, it is why we are disturbed that we still sin.
We are now living in a relationship with God. And, yes, we are not perfect, but—and here is the one last point I will make—death in the Bible has everything to do with it being the result of sin. You die and are eternally separated from God because you sinned. But we have been buried with Jesus in his death and raised to new life in him. The wages of our sin, death, has been paid, and that is what death means in this context. It does not mean we have somehow become perfect. It means the price is paid, so let’s live for God.
I will leave it at this point. These chapters are like onions, we could just keep peeling the layers back. But as we conclude chapter 6, I pray you have seen that Paul is not interested in giving us some human-made religion. Rather he is disarming religion in order that we might plant ourselves in a relationship. And there are no “yeah, buts’” about it!
What “yeah buts” might you have?