Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:1-11)
Non-Christians consider it unhealthy to think so much about sin and condemnation. But if it is unhealthy at all, it is even more unhealthy to have the flames of hell burn your flesh and consume your soul. That is very unhealthy. Non-Christians persist in their wicked thoughts and deeds, “although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death” (Romans 1:32). Instead of retaining the knowledge of God (1:28), they suppress it (1:18). But it is not easy. They work hard to bury it under jobs, friends, amusements, alternate priorities, and false theories and religions, even their charity works. Some of them take lots of pills. Still, not too far beneath their immediate consciousness, the knowledge of God abides as a witness against them, and it rises up now and then to disturb their delusion. So some of them commit suicide. You ask, “Doesn’t that make it worse, and send them straight to the place they wish to avoid in the first place?” Right, they are not very smart.
Even non-Christians admit that it is unhealthy to be in denial, but they are in denial about their denial. Jesus Christ changes this. When he comes to a man’s life, he takes him by the hand and leads him to the mirror of God’s word. There the man sees himself with all his filth and depravity, all his failures and shortcomings. He perceives that he is an awful and worthless person that could never pay his debt to God even if he were to burn forever in punishment. He is astonished at his plight and his helplessness. But soon despair gives way to hope, and power, and gladness as he learns that Jesus Christ has paid for his many sins, and that by clinging to him he is forever secure before God. Sometimes people say that the life of Christ grants us joy, not happiness. But I am very happy. I am happy not because of pleasant circumstances and not because the demons are subject to me, but because my name is written in heaven.
Jesus takes us from the realm of delusion to the realm of reality, and the reality is that we were “powerless,” “ungodly,” even the “enemies” of God, and not worth dying for. Preachers sometimes attempt to bolster people’s self-esteem by asserting that Christ’s sacrifice proves the incalculable worth of all men and women, and that if we would learn to see ourselves as God sees us – as people so valuable that it was worth the suffering and death of the Son of God – then we would not wallow in defeat and self-pity.
However, Paul teaches an opposite doctrine. Using a human analogy, he notes that it is rare for a person to die even for a righteous man, although it is possible. And we were not righteous, but powerless, ungodly, and the enemies of God. It is for this reason that Christ’s sacrifice is all the more magnified. Therefore, to assert that the sacrifice demonstrates our worth rather than his grace is to depreciate his work. He died for us not because of our worth, but because of his worth.
The apostle indirectly addresses the question of whether the elect, created and chosen for salvation, were ever God’s enemies. As the chosen ones, it would seem that we were never not God’s people. Jesus himself said that the sheep hear his voice and that some do not hear his voice because they are not his sheep. This means that people do not become God’s sheep when they convert, but they convert because they are his sheep. Yet our text asserts that we were God’s enemies. Like all biblical doctrines, there is in fact no difficulty.
Suppose I am a police officer and my son commits a crime. He becomes my enemy from the law’s standpoint, but even then he remains my son. I would arrest him, and as I put the cuffs on him, he is still my son. For any other criminal, that would be the end of the matter for me. But because this one is my son, after I have arrested him I would hire a lawyer to defend him, and if possible, make restitution for his crimes. Either after he has been acquitted or spent his time in jail, I would watch over him, counsel him, and admonish him to ensure that he becomes a law-abiding man. So he transforms from a criminal to an upright citizen, and under the law, from my enemy to my friend, but all the time the defining factor in our relationship has been the fact that he is my son.
As with most analogies, this one is far from perfect, but if we can overlook the deficiencies, it illustrates that my relation to a person does not have to be dictated by the fact that he is my enemy under the law, if my relation to him is defined by a factor that holds a greater and prior significance. Likewise, a man can be God’s enemy and God can still deal with him as he would a son if God himself has ordained a relationship with the person that holds a greater and eternal significance.
This is to say that the issue presents no problem under a supralapsarian scheme of the order of the eternal decrees. God decided in eternity that he would glorify himself by glorifying Jesus Christ. And he would glorify Jesus Christ by making him the savior and champion of a chosen group of men and women. (His role entails other achievements, but for the sake of simplicity we will keep the description narrow and relevant to our context.) He would be their savior and champion by his sacrifice for them, so that through him they might be justified before God. In order for them to need such a salvation, God declared that they would be sinners, even enemies of God from the standpoint of his righteousness. And in order for this whole plan to begin, he would create the first man and effect his fall into sin.
Therefore, God conceived the chosen ones as his precious people in eternity before they were born in history, and they were created as sinners in history so that they could be redeemed and converted. On the other hand, God conceived the reprobates as targets of his wrath in eternity, and they were created as sinners in history so that they could be confirmed in sin and condemned to hell. Elements of this have been suggested in the previous chapters of Romans, and Paul would render certain points more explicit in Romans 9 and other places. As usual, there is no mystery in this doctrine, but only truth and clarity.
Predestination does not do away with history, but it causes history to unfold according to God’s plan. The order of historical events – being born in sin, hearing the gospel, converting to Christ and being justified in Christ – are meaningful because God makes them meaningful in relation to one another, so that even as some theologians speak of an eternal justification of the saints, it is still appropriate to refer to events in their historical order and relation.
God’s eternal plan and its relation to how it unfolds in history are easy to grasp. All we have said is that God foreordains all events in eternity and then causes these events in the proper order in history. The doctrine itself is straightforward, but sometimes confusion arises when we talk about it. This could be the result of a failure to distinguish between God’s decree and its execution, and also of equivocations in the use of terms such as justification and sanctification. The context, or whether we refer to these things from the standpoint of eternity or history, would determine how we speak about them.
Returning to the imagery that Jesus used, we derive a summary that can hardly be bettered. God’s chosen ones have always been his sheep, but they have wandered off. Then the shepherd calls to them. The sheep know his voice, and the voice of a stranger they will not follow. If God had not made us his sheep in eternity, we would never have believed, but the reality in history is that we had wandered off and became lost. Jesus Christ is the shepherd of our souls. He recovered us and brought us into the Father’s presence.
As for the enmity itself, here the emphasis falls on the objective antagonism between God and humanity because of God’s righteousness and mankind’s transgression. Of course, this determines the subjective attitudes as well. No doubt sinners harbor much animosity toward God, but it is not as if they can do anything to hurt him. The rage against God is ineffectual and self-destructive. The real issue is how these detestable creatures can be reconciled to a righteous God. Paul’s diagnosis is that non-Christians are powerless, ungodly, without God and without hope in this world. But God, for the love of his name and his chosen ones, sent Jesus Christ and made atonement for our sins.
Non-Christians are hardened. Against all truth and reason, and in defiance of what they know in their hearts, they resist our message about God, sin, righteousness, and redemption. They do not want to think about these things. On the other hand, some people become aware that they are God’s enemies even before we say much about this, and they are genuinely worried about it. And they quickly recognize that only the Christian faith possesses the solution. It is not because they are naturally better than those who remain obstinate, but it is because God has already started a work in their hearts, preparing them for faith. Thus whereas many refuse to come to Christ, some are ripe and ready for harvest. Their concern is not unhealthy, but instead it shows a psychological development that the others lack. Our minds mature when God leads us to think about eternal issues and the deeper things of life, cumulating in the conclusion that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the savior of all those who trust in him.
We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. All enmity has ended. We are saved from God’s wrath, and there is no more war. This peace is the basis for further progress in the life of Christ. Those who are hardened do not grasp the significance of a right standing before God, and the new era that dawns on each individual as Christ puts an end to his conflict with heaven. Their spirits are dull. They do not admit their sins, and they do not care to have them forgiven by this God. In fact, they think that God himself should ask their forgiveness for a few things. The great gulf that Abraham spoke about exists now in our minds and in our lives. We are here with Christ, and they are over on the other side. God will bring some of them over to us, but the gulf will soon be impossible to cross.
A major aim in our preaching is to make people think about this: Do you have peace with God? You spend all your energy thinking about your career, your family, your love life, but do you have peace with God? We immediately run into a wall of intellectual retardation that human power cannot penetrate. But God will stir up his chosen ones, and he will work with our voice to do it. Then we tell them that God has made a way. You can have peace with God through Jesus Christ.
This is a solemn command, never a sincere offer. Believe, and live. Surrender, or perish. Take it, and have life and peace. Some theologians believe that it would make sense to preach the gospel to all men only when we reduce it to a sincere offer, in which even God who has foreordained the damnation of the reprobates sincerely offers to save them. Of course, this turns God into a schizophrenic, but theologians can euphemize any blasphemy by calling it a mystery.
But there is no mystery, because the gospel is not an offer but it is truth that all are obligated to believe. The inability of reprobates to believe does not excuse them from the command to believe. Sinners are unable to refrain from sin and still they are condemned for their sins, else all sinners would be justified from their sins precisely because they are sinners. Judgment has never been about moral ability, but it is about whether a transgression has occurred. If it has, then the offender is subject to punishment.
On the one hand, the theologians confess that God has immutably determined the exact identities of the reprobates, so that it is impossible for them to accept the gospel of Jesus Christ and receive salvation. On the other hand, they insist that when the gospel is preached to the reprobates, God extends a sincere or well-meant offer of salvation to them, so that if they were to believe they would be saved. However, if God has immutably decreed the damnation of the reprobates, and if he extends a sincere or well-meant offer to them, then this must mean that in the preaching of the gospel God is saying, “If you can come up to heaven and pin me down, and stab me to death so that you can become God yourself (which is the only way to nullify the immutable decree), then you can believe the gospel of Christ and receive salvation.” Of course, if the reprobates can do that, they would hardly need to believe the gospel.
Given God’s immutable decree, if the gospel is a sincere offer to the reprobates, this is the only meaning possible. Is this what the theologians have in mind? Do they mean that in the preaching of the gospel, God extends a sincere and well-meant offer to kill him? Anyone who affirms the doctrine but does not teach it this way is either confused or dishonest, because this must be what the doctrine means. Since it is impossible to kill God, the preaching of the gospel then amounts to an obscene gesture against the reprobates: “Take this!” If this is what the sincere offer means, then I have no problem with it, because then the sincere offer becomes just a coward’s way of referring to a hostile challenge.
Then, the doctrine often includes the idea that the gospel is a sincere offer in the sense that God genuinely wishes for the reprobates to believe the message and receive salvation, even though he has already expressed his wish to damn them in the eternal decree. This means that the theologians consider God to be both schizophrenic and suicidal, and that he sincerely wishes to be destroyed and cease to be God whenever the gospel is preached to reprobates. But God knows that it is impossible for him to be annihilated, and it would be futile to invite puny humans to attempt it; moreover, there is no biblical evidence to suggest that he so eagerly begs to be dethroned. Rather, he has declared that he will reign forever. What we can say for certain is that, once a theologian asserts such a schizophrenic and suicidal tendency in God, he ceases to be a Christian theologian, but has become a heretic and a blasphemer.
Think about this offer I made to a friend: “If you would pluck up Japan with your little finger, then uproot India with your big toe, make a ham and cheese sandwich with the two lands, fly to Mars with it, raise three million hippos on this Sandwichland, transport the hippos back on flaming chariots made of diamond, and travel back in time ten years with one of these fiery hippos and give it to my sister – and I do not have a sister – then I will give you ten dollars.” What is the problem? It is a sincere offer, and very well-meant. I would really pay him ten dollars for the accomplishment. But am I being generous, or am I really mocking him and saying, “You can go die for all I care, but I am never giving you ten dollars”? In any case, the reprobates would do well to get in on this offer than to believe the theologians, since there is a much better chance of them doing what I asked than to overturn the immutable decree of God.
A common response to the doctrine of the sincere offer is that we will preach the gospel to all men because we cannot distinguish between the elect and the reprobates. Although this is true, it is also irrelevant. God’s command to preach to all men is sufficient regardless of whether we know why we should or whether we can distinguish between the elect and the reprobates. But we do know why. Supposing that it is possible to identify them, I would preach even to those whom I know to be reprobates. This is because the gospel is not only a summons to the chosen ones for salvation, but it is also a witness against the reprobates to further expose their wickedness, to increase their condemnation, and to multiply their punishment in hell. Thus Paul says that his preaching is the aroma of life to those who believe, but it is the stench of death to those who are damned. An intended function of the gospel is to make things worse for the reprobates.
Paul builds on justification and continues to our progress in the faith. The human personality does not develop in the right direction until we begin with Jesus Christ. Faith is a first sign of psychological health. Does faith make us dependent? But men are dependent. Either they leech on each other for assurance, for approval, for company, dragging one another down in the process, or they pretend not to care and harden themselves, smiling on the outside but rotting on the inside. Faith is an expression of intelligent dependence, because it relies on the power of God and not the weakness of men. Faith makes us holy and strong. Faith enables us to grow through adversity, and it fosters a hope that does not disappoint, because it is not based on the delusion of men but on the reality of God’s love and his salvation through Jesus Christ.