The street was wet, the trees were dripping and the morning of our big church yard sale had arrived this past Saturday. It had rained in the night and a gray sky seemed to promise more showers. We could have held the sale indoors, but its effectiveness would be hugely reduced by a crowded space and the lack of outdoor visibility. After deliberating for a few minutes, my wife Beth made the call: “Carry those loaded tables out to the parking lot. We’re going to try it.”
There was a bit of grounding for the hope Beth exercised in that moment on Saturday. The forecast was a 20% chance of showers and it wasn’t raining right then. The thing was that once the time came, the move was made from simply hoping it wouldn’t rain to living in and acting on that hope.
The transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 in Romans is a sizeable shift both in style and content for Paul’s argument. Up until now he has been largely concerned with exihibiting how it is that both Jews and Gentiles are included in the covenant righteousness fulfilled in Jesus. His answer was to point to Abraham’s justification, his being reckoned righteous through faith in Genesis 15. In the same way as Abraham, and in completion of the covenant with Abraham, faith in Jesus Christ brings both Jew and Gentile into the covenant people, Abraham’s family.
Now with chapter 5, Paul begins to explore what comes of justification by faith in Christ in the life of God’s covenant people. If we are reckoned as righteous in Jesus, what does that imply now for how we live? Chapters 5-8 unpack the answer to that question, dealing with some of the implications of being reckoned righteous through faith because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Our text for this Sunday, Romans 5:1-11, offers the initial celebratory claim that our status as justified by faith gives us unprecedented hope. We have an unshakeable ground of hope in the love of God (verse 5), demonstrated in the fact that Christ died for us “while we still were sinners” (verse 8).
Hope for those justified by faith in Christ centers in the fact that we are at peace with God (verse 1) and need not fear His wrath (verse 9) and that we have been reconciled to God (verses 10 & 11) by the atonement of the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are not God’s enemies anymore, but His friends. This all harks back to and becomes the answer for the wrath of God seen as the sentence on sinful humanity in the latter part of chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2.
So the first result of justification is that we are blessed with a sure and confident hope. That hope calls for lives of dedication and sacrifice that go well beyond taking a risk on the weather. That hope also shows up cheap counterfeit hopes like Harold Camping’s numerology. We don’t base our faith in salvation from God’s wrath on our ability to calculate some secret Bible code. We base it on what has clearly been done by God, that Jesus loved us enough to die for us while we were still weak and sinful.
And, unlike the rapture that didn’t happen last Saturday, such hope in what Jesus has already accomplished on our behalf “does not disappoint us” (verse 5), because it is grounded in the gracious love poured out on us and in us through the Holy Spirit.
By the way, beside no rapture, there was also no rain here on Saturday. So our sale was a huge success and we felt very blessed. But that should only call us to remember the greater, more sure blessings we have in Christ, and live in true hope in Him.