Alive to God

Romans got under way with Paul explaining God’s case for condemnation: no one lives the way God wants; many don’t care.  It’s been like this a long time, almost from the start.  The missing ingredient is righteousness—without righteousness, there is only condemnation.  Righteousness is being in vital relationship with God—life is in righteousness.  The condemned cannot produce or procure righteousness; they are helpless but not hopeless.  Righteousness is available, by justification—being made right with God.  Justification comes through faith, faith in the righteousness of God.  This was the lesson of Abraham: God chooses to regard faith as righteousness.

Forgiveness and the application to us of God’s righteousness comes through the Justifier—God—in Christ Jesus, the Righteous One.  What Christ does at the cross makes justification—that is, forgiveness and righteousness—available for the condemned, through faith in who Jesus truly is and what he truly does for us at the cross.  Our faith, in other words, is faith in the perfect, effective righteousness of Jesus.  God takes a world that has willfully, stubbornly plunged itself in sin, and offers life to whoever wants it: it is life, life in Christ, life on God’s terms.

Here now at the sixth chapter of Romans, Paul is thinking and arguing in a way that feels strange to us, though it is entirely biblical.  A key underlying premise is this: everything is under God’s authority and control.  God directs all things according to His purpose.  This is a central pillar of Reformed theology, our theology: the sovereignty of God.  This sovereignty—all under God’s authority and direction—ought to be comfort for us and encouragement.  It might also make us angry: What about my cancer, then?  What about my dear friend’s husband’s dementia?  What about that bombing?  What about that tornado?  After all, bad things shouldn’t happen, especially to good people, or even me; God shouldn’t let bad things happen.  We may recognize the immaturity in that perspective, but doing so doesn’t keep us from feeling the pang.  Where’s the justice in it all?  Where’s the love?  Let’s also remember the cross, beloved, seeing Jesus there, where love, justice, grace, and glory meet.

Consider the alternative—hardly anything, or nothing at all, under God’s control!  Maybe like me, you like that thought even less.  Where such thinking (such fear) takes hold—all out of control—whoever appears able to manage things for us becomes like God to us: just provide for us and keep us safe and happy!  If God is powerless to do anything about whatever happens in this life, well, woe is us.

Paul told us, “[t]he law was brought in so that the trespass might increase” (5:20).  And we say, What?  God wants sins to increase?  Why?  And, to increase trespasses, He used the law, which tells us what is good and what pleases Him?  What?  Truly, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts!  Scripture tells us that God will certainly act, once the full measure of iniquity has been filled—the bucket isn’t full yet!  We pray He would hasten the day.  The law forbids sin, forbids sinful acts.  The law is powerless to prevent sin, as we know.  The law cannot change a sin-glutted heart or renew a sin-clouded mind.  The law only calls out sin for what it is: disobedience, defying the clear expectations and standards of God.  Sin is spitting in the face of God.  All the more astonishing, then, that God permits it!  But there is a plan; there has always been a plan.  It is a plan to vindicate God’s name—demonstrate conclusively the glorious, gracious truth of His character—to obtain justice for God, and to save those whom God has, for His own reasons, chosen to save.  God is our strong salvation.  He is also the Judge.  We do not bypass judgment; we are saved from condemnation.  We are forgiven.

For Paul, the key point is not the role of law in multiplying sins but this: “where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:20-21).  It pleases God to multiply grace, more.  An exponential increase in sin gives Him the occasion to manifest grace beyond our imagination.  The focal point of this overflowing grace is the eternal life God makes available through Christ.  How to access the grace?  Through righteousness: the righteousness of Christ, applied to us.  As Christ’s perfect, complete, and abundant righteousness is applied to us—this happens through the Holy Spirit, reworking us—we conscientiously work on cultivating a vital relationship with God.  That, as we also know, is possible for us only through grace—so we rely on grace to access additional grace.  The technical term for that continual reliance is faith: unending, conscious reliance on the unlimited, powerful grace of God.

Paul wants us to consider seriously, reverently: if God is pleased to provide more than sufficient grace, extending His hands for us, opening His heart to us, clearing the way for us, how shall we respond?  What kind of life is God calling us into?  How are those relying on grace supposed to live their lives?  “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (6:1).  I mean, there’s one option: we sin, and God responds with grace.  That sounds Christian-ish.  People listening to Paul had misunderstood: they heard him say law was gone, freedom had come.  That was their green light to do whatever they wanted.  It was all blessed by God and good, now, because there was no longer any law, in Christ; thus, no sin—well, there may still be sin, of course, but that’s what other people do, not what I do.

We know, from our own hard experience, that faith, real faith in Jesus, is no guarantee that you or I never shall stumble, hurt ourselves, or others.  We’ve blown it, big, more than once, even since coming to Christ.  And the knowledge that there is grace is comfort and consolation, truly—but the knowledge that there is indeed grace must never become a license, excuse, or justification to sin: I’ll just do this, anyway, and I’m just sure God will forgive me, because He’s a God of love, after all—I just couldn’t worship Him, otherwise.  The law was introduced also to make us conscious of sin, including our own.  To be conscious of sin is to know what sin truly is and that it truly displeases God, defies God, and brings God’s wrath—but hey, if He’s just going to forgive us in the end after all, anyway . . . We love to hear, I’ll love you, no matter what, but that is not the same as saying, I’ll forgive you, whatever you do to me.  Maybe some of us have loved those who made a habit of harm, and we know we just can’t have that in our lives.

Grace increases not merely because sin increases: grace is not primarily a response to sin.  Sin is not like the gas pedal for grace.  Sin is not the cause of grace.  God is the source of grace, and He decides.  Grace is how God chooses to respond to sin, for a time.  Throughout Scripture, God is praised for His “kindness, forbearance and patience [. . .] to lead [us] to repentance” (2:4).  Peter reminds us, “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation” (2 Pet 3:15); “he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9).  God tells Ezekiel to say to the people, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.  Turn!  Turn from your evil ways!  Why will you die[?]” (Ezek 33:11).  Dead set, hellbent—Lord, help us!

Almost the first word out of the mouth of Jesus when he began his ministry was repent.  Grace comes with repentance; repentance happens because of grace.  Repentance puts us in a changed relation to sin.  The New Testament Greek word for repentance, the word Paul is using, makes this changed relation clear: metanoia means a change of mind.  Not like I wanted pizza but then changed my mind.  God changes how we see, think, feel.  He proceeds to change our values by renewing us after His own holy will; he sanctifies us.  Be holy, for I am holy, says the Lord—that expectation, that invitation, never changes.  God causes a change in our relation to sin.  That also changes our relation with Him.  Before God, Jesus, and the words of the Bible became really real for us, we sinned and may have felt sort of crummy about it but never let that stop us.  Sin, feel sort of rotten, repeat.  Over time, the process hardens people, hardens the heart, the thinking, hardens vision.  It may have been long ago for us and now almost impossible to recall—but there was a time when even we conformed ourselves to the desires of our spiritual ignorance; we went along with the world, latching on to secular values, feeling sort of good about ourselves for adopting such supposed wisdom and supposed morality.

Tirelessly, patiently, consistently, God makes plain that having faith in Him means we do not live like the lost.  Living by faith means living life God’s way: that doesn’t look like what TV and the internet, with its never-ceasing flood of fads and fashionistas, tell us is in the vanguard of self-discovery and self-love.  Even the spiritually ignorant are well aware that there are people (Christians) who call things sin that others call self-discovery, self-fulfillment, and good.

When we received Christ as our Savior and Lord, we entered into a changed relationship not only with God but also with the sin oh so familiar to us.  The sin didn’t go away, but we entered a changed association with it because God laid hold of us: O love that will not let us go.  God has power to prevent sin; grace is power not to sin, to turn away . . . grace is also the sure offer of true forgiveness when we come to the Lord our Savior and fall on our faces before Him.

Now that God has truly arrived for us by grace through faith, we are no longer able to treat the sin, our sin, lightly, shrug it off, let alone stubbornly continue in or increase it, telling ourselves it doesn’t really matter or isn’t really sin, telling ourselves that’s just what narrow-minded, literalist bigots say.  We could no longer tell ourselves what we were doing, how we were living, really had no spiritual consequences and no real impact on our relationship with God or our fellow human beings.  It’s thinking like that that grieves the Holy Spirit: telling ourselves that what the Spirit, through God’s Word, names as sin is really no sin at all.  The Spirit wakes us up; we wake to the truth.  We wake up to true righteousness—the sort of relationship God wants us to have with Him.

Yes, thank God—once we come to faith, the broken practices and our relation to them begin to change!  We don’t lie to ourselves about them; we don’t forever beat ourselves up because of the traces of them in us still.  We redirect heart, mind, and soul to God, and seek always to rest in Him.  It’s the broken principles aiding and abetting the broken practices—principles that come into the church from the world because the church is composed of people who come in from the world, with hearts, minds still exhibiting the world’s ways—it’s these broken principles and those reluctant to release them to God’s grace—reluctant to release that death grip upon broken, fallen values!—it’s exactly these who need the greater power of exposure to God’s glory.

For Paul, what happened at the cross goes far beyond what you or I ordinarily consider.  What Jesus did has tremendous and beautiful results for us, Amen!  For Paul, there’s even more to it; there’s more at stake.  “We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?  Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (6:2-3).

Dying to sin is not a metaphor for Paul; it is a spiritual reality, an actual change of status—not experienced immediately, fully, but in effect and effective, nonetheless.  To be joined to Christ, as we are through faith, as we proclaim at baptism, means we are united with him, mystically, spiritually, truly.  Interwoven, now; saturated, soaked with Christ.  Christians are no longer in a position to sin as if sin were no problem, not even really sin at all, because Christians are those united with Christ, blood brothers and sisters, despite the broken sin-chains clanking and dragging along all the remainder of our days in this life.

Christ’s death on the cross was our death to sin, through faith in Christ.  It was like a change of ownership—the blood-price was paid and ownership of us transferred from our Enemy to Christ Jesus.  People have long wondered about what, if anything, was happening on the Saturday between Christ’s burial and the Resurrection.  Was nothing happening?  Maybe.  That feels a bit strange, though.  Maybe Jesus, in the Spirit, was tying up the strong man, to ransack his house and take for himself all he came for.  In his claiming us, we now belong to God.

Paul elaborates: “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (6:4).  A new life.  Not that old life, so familiar to us.  New ways.  Not those old ways that someway always did feel wrong—not that we let that stop us.  Sin did what it could to us—it killed us.  And then . . . resurrection.  Once again, but differently, gloriously differently, what one did, now by grace through faith has consequences for all.  When we receive Christ as Savior and Lord, we are in a sense divorced from Adam, emancipated.  Receiving Christ, we are spiritually joined with Jesus, so that all that he did becomes part of us, spiritually; we participate in what he endured and experienced.  He died.  We die with him.  His baptism was not for any sins of his.  He went under the waters of God’s judgment upon sinful humanity to rise again in glory, claiming us along the way—he dove in to pull us out.  Out of the old chaos we arise, lifted in Christ’s arms, filled with the breath of Life.  Our baptism assures us that God washes away our sin through the blood of Jesus, that God receives us again, restored to Him as His very own, in Christ.  A solemn, joyful, sacred covenant.  The dying is for the rising, the death of what was for the life of what shall be, the life to come, already developing in us.  The new life is, necessarily, a changed life, a God-directed life.  Lilacs out of the dead land.

Life for the early Christians was not a simple matter.  They were not especially welcome among Jews—among whom Christians first began to gather and worship.  They were not especially welcome among the pagans, the gentiles of the Roman Empire: Christians lived by a different code, would not do things that all pagans did, even things regarded as right and proper in the pagan world.  Christians lived in such a way that, though they were in the world, they would not be of the world, because the world was a fallen world and Christians, by grace through faith, had been redeemed from it.  They would no longer worship at the altars of this world.  This has always marked followers of Christ, and always will.  Oh, the world will tolerate a “Christianity” that deifies secular values, calling these God’s Word.  There is no denomination,  no congregation, and no disciple exempt from the temptation to do so.

The world will make life hard for followers of Christ.  In America, we are somewhat insulated from that, but not immune.  This culture is corrosive, diluting, dissolving historic, orthodox Christianity.  The pillars crumble, the churches surrender—without calling it that, of course.  In Paul’s day, as in our own, the question, the calculation, was whether it was worth it to be a Christian.  Why set ourselves up for ridicule, censure, disapproval, criticism, to be thought of as “those people,” when we could instead go along with the best and brightest of our times, believe what they believe, do what they do, and call it Jesus . . . or not?  For Paul, well aware of the Day of the Lord, of what Scripture had to say of that day, what Jesus taught about it, resurrection and the life to come—life in, through, and with Christ—this made all the challenge, difficulty, and suffering worth the cost.

In Christ’s death, we—mystically, spiritually, and actually—die to sin.  God breaks our bondage to sinfulness, at the cross.  This does not mean we stop sinning, but we enter a changed relation to sin; we enter upon a journey over which, more and more, we come to think and feel differently about sin, seeing it for what it is as we also see God more and more for who He is.  And along the way we all have ups and downs, periods of coolness, and seasons of beautiful fervor.  We are here, with one another, here for one another, through it all—the Spirit blesses us with true, meaningful fellowship, friendship in Christ.

In Christ’s resurrection, we have the promise of our own.  “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with [rendered powerless], that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin” (6:6-7).  Ruled by sin, slaves to sin—who thinks that way?  Lighten up!  Nobody talks that way—nobody but Christians, if they’re talking and thinking, knowing and going, biblically.  Bondage to sin is an old habit; it’s hard to break, as we know.  At first, the habit can be devilishly hard even to see.  It can take years to understand that the chains really are broken, although we behave as if they were still intact.

The habit isn’t hard for God to break in us, only very costly.  In a world given to sin, the only way to be set free is to die.  The wages of sin is death, final bill, paid in full.  As it turns out, God pays the bill for us: that’s grace.

Paul is reminding and warning us that there is a power at work in all people, even if we aren’t always conscious of it, a power stronger than we are.  Paul is also reminding us that there is likewise an even stronger power, now also at work in those who receive Jesus Christ as Savior, and Lord: power for living.  Not power for sinning—we have more than enough of that already.  No, this new, greater power is power for living, power for righteousness.  “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (6:8).  If we died with Christ.  How do we know whether we have died with Christ?  We know when we receive him—and all he is, all he does—as Savior, and Lord.  Wanting Jesus, loving Jesus—this makes the difference, no matter where we’re at or what we’re in the middle of when he takes hold of us.

We experience hints and moments: we begin to wonder and understand that something has happened and is happening in our lives—God is here; God is at work.  Glory, grace.  Often, He works quietly, behind the scenes.  Sometimes more directly, openly.  Our mystical union with Christ by faith through the Holy Spirit testifies that we died with Christ.  The same Spirit, working faith in us, at work in us through faith, assures us that we will live, with him.  The ground for that assurance is that “Christ was raised from the dead” (6:9); therefore, “he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him” (6:9).  It was only a supposed mastery to begin with: death presumed to claim Jesus, at the cross; from the tomb, Jesus demolished death.  Death never had mastery over him: he tells his followers, “I lay down my life—only to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again” (Jn 10:17-18).  How does a dead man take up his life again?

When God joins us to Christ, we are joined to the one “who cannot die again.”  The one who cannot die lives, will always live, always be alive, always have life.  He will give life to those who come to him for it.  The only ones who can come to Jesus are sinners, sinners who hate their sin, who have discovered, to their shame and dismay, that they don’t have it in them not to sin.  Jesus will do it, for us.  That has real-time, daily consequences for us because, by grace, through faith, Christ lives, in us.  Paul calls us, as Christ calls us, deliberately, conscientiously, daily, to pattern our living after Christ’s life: “The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.  In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (6:10-11).  All who are in Christ are alive to God; with Christ, God gives them life that cannot be taken from them.