Paul's Network of Terms

From Everday Bible Study on Romans.

God’s Love

Romans 5:1-11

5:1     Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

6        You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

9        Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, while 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! 11 Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

When you turn in your Bible from Romans 4 to Romans 5 you will notice a massive shift in tone, in style, and in direction. The tone is much warmer, the style shifts from interrogation through Q&A to straightforward explanation, and the direction is how to live as a follower of Jesus with real-life solutions and experiences and emotions. Paul’s real-life solutions for Christian living form into a network of words. So I repeat the words that ended the previous chapter. Paul’s most important words – like love, Adam and Christ, baptism, Agent Sin, Agent Life, the law, the Ego, Spirit and Flesh, Suffering, and Victory – form into a network of words about redemptive peace. These words matter, and they matter so much they connect in the network in a way that redefines each one. Before Paul, none of these words meant what they mean for Paul.

What they mean for Paul, too, points directly at the problems in Rome between believers: the Powerful and the Powerless. Think of the Three C’s of a church culture, its organization, and its leadership. There is Coercion, a top-down, authoritative leader approach. Coercive leadership will eventually lead to conflict that provokes someone or someones to form into Competition with the leader. Good leaders reject coercion and have the social skills to promote Cooperation, which prevents Competition from appearing. The house churches in Rome are in a Competitive phase, and Paul pleads for Cooperation. Paul’s network of words wants to snag Coercion and Competition and overcome them with Cooperation.

One little term gets ignored, and I didn’t mention it above. Paul shifts from “you” language in Romans 2-4 to “we” language. In today’s passage alone we have we, us, and ours used twenty-three times in the NIV. He has turned from pointing at problem people or speaking to them to including himself in a mutual reality with them. Paul’s language becomes a pastoral signal that’s he’s done (for four chapters) with the interrogation so he can provide for them the solution to the problems they are facing in Rome.

         A theology of the Christian life begins with God’s unconditioned love, and God’s love does at least four things.

God’s love for us creates peace with God

         When I was a child our church sang classic hymns, and there were enough good singers who knew how to sing parts that we could at times really roll (but not rock or Rick). One of my favorites was when the good singers harmonized and echoed one another, and then with some songs we (Baptists, so we were careful) swayed with our bodies to words like those in this song:

It is well (it is well)
With my soul (with my soul)
It is well, it is well with my soul.

The song began where Romans 5 begins, and the lyrics probably came from that very verse, beginning with “When peace like a river attendeth my way.” If you grew up with this hymn, know that we are now waiting for you to find it on YouTube, listen to it a couple times, and then return to this spot in the book.

         You back yet? Let’s move on.

Soul peace is an internal contentment in God’s love, in God’s redemption in Jesus Christ, in God’s Spirit prompting that love in our heart, and in a contentment that empowers us to walk forward knowing God is with us and behind us and before us. Those who have peace with God become agents of peace with others. Which means the peace here cannot be reduced to soul-peace because true peace includes peace with others, justice, safety, and health. To be sure, peace with God forms the heart of peace.

         Because God has made us right with himself through Christ by faith (or perhaps by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ himself), we have this peace – knowing that “we have gained access by faith into this grace [of righteousness]” (5:2). One cannot sum up what God has done for us with one term, so Paul uses a number here because each adds to the other: justify, peace, access, grace, hope, and glory of God (not our own status). We are to remember that God in Christ justifies, and we participate in that right-making through trust and allegiance. Because God loves us, God justifies; because God justifies, we have peace with God; because we have peace with God, we have peace with one another.

God’s love for us permeates our heart

         God’s love “has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” whom God has given to us (5:5). This set of words describes a permeating, emotional reality deriving from the divine energy at work in the experience of peace in 5:1. Namely, that any “suffering” for Christ that comes our way can be captured – paradoxically – in the word “glory” because in that suffering, we come to know the love of God. Not that Paul likes or minimizes suffering, but he has learned in his own suffering that it can impact us in a good way. It promotes spiritual formation in perseverance, character, and hope (5:4).

         God is love. God made us in his image, and part of that image is our capacity to love God and others and our capacity to experience God’s love and the love of others. To know we are loved by others produces peace in us, but to know we are loved by God produces the deepest peace in the depth of our innermost being.

God’s love for ignores our social status and forgives our sins

         Fleming Rutledge, in a sermon at Duke University Chapel, once said, “The one great mistake we could make today is to think of ourselves in the wrong category” (Rutledge, “The Enemy Lines Are Hard to Find,” 346). We are not, she observes, the righteous but the sinners. God’s love coordinates with our being “powerless” and “ungodly” and “sinners” and “enemies” (5:6-11; recall the “but now” in 3:21). One feels like Paul is using a thesaurus to find words about the benefits of the gospel and the condition of humans who experience the benefits of salvation. Four terms here reveal that God disregards our status in this world, which will have taken a bite out of the ego of anyone stereotyping others or appealing to privilege. God doesn’t care if we are the Powerless. He loves us and directs his Son’s demonstration of cross-love right at all of us.

         In fact, God’s love becomes the death of Christ for us. His death not only demonstrates God’s love and the kind of love God has, and these are both true, but his death embodies God who is love.

         His second term is found in “Christ died for the ungodly” (5:6). The NIV’s “ungodly” is a traditional translation but the term (asebēs) in the Roman world was used for those whose public religious practices were socially disrespectable. It was used for Romans and Greeks who did not attend public ceremonies, traditional celebrations, and religious events. So, “ungodly” works as long as we keep in mind that the “god” in “ungodly” was not just the one true God but also the gods of their world. Thus, this terms coordinates with the powerless term. Jesus died for those who didn’t give a flip about religion or custom or tradition and who were hence powerless in the Roman world.

         A third term is sinners. Sinners are those who “miss the mark” when shooting an arrow. But it can mean to miss, to fail, to lack, to fall short, to offend, and even to be mistaken. In a Jewish worldview a sinner ignores or chooses to violate a law of God or a traditional rule derived from interpreting the law of God. A “righteous person” or a “good person” (5:7-8) does the will of God consistently.

         The final term is enemies (5:10), humans hostile toward God and God’s will, who rebel against God, who fight God, and who violate God’s will intentionally and flagrantly and even publicly. We can imagine those who thumb their nose to God.

         It does not matter if we are powerless and publicly irreligious, nor does it matter if we are sinners and hostile toward God – God loves us, God sent his Son for us, and his Son has died for us so we can turn to God in faith and be transformed by the Spirit into agents of love for all humans, especially everyone in the family of Jesus. God’s love for us makes no sense, and no one has said this more forcefully than Peter Groves:

Love makes no sense. It is unsettling, undermining, deconstructive. It turns our world upside down, challenges all our preconceptions, invites us to reconsider the whole of our lives now that love has arrived on the scene. The absurdity of Christianity is not just that the love that makes no sense is the truth that we find in Jesus of Nazareth. The real absurdity of Christianity is the claim that that love is what we are talking about when we are talking about God himself. God is love, and love makes no sense (Love Makes No Sense, 10-11).

When Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies (Matthew 5:43-48), he was on a mission from the Father to demonstrate, teach, and embody that love in a death that redefined love – a love that, yes, seems to make no sense until you know it does.

God’s love for us generates eternal life

         Everyone dies. Those who were following Jesus also knew that any of them could disappear that day into the dungeons of persecution and suffering and death. Following death, each person faces God. Paul turns now to how God’s unconditioned love shapes how to face the future. Because God made us right through the death and resurrection of Jesus (4:25), we are not only saved now but we will be saved in the future “from God’s wrath” (5:9). In the Bible the anger of God comes to expression against those who rebel against God knowingly. It’s a kind of inner being repulsion by God toward what is so un-God-like or what is non-God.

         If we are justified, we will be saved from that wrath.

         If we are reconciled, we will be “saved through his life” (5:10).

If all this is true, we now no longer boast about ourselves but we boast in Christ alone (5:11).

One sentence summary: the Christian life begins in the love of God and knows by experience that God loves us and that God’s love works in us to transform all of life, including our bodies.

Questions for Reflection and Application

1. How does Paul’s shift from “you” to “we” signal a change in his approach in chapter 5?

2. What do you think Paul’s personal sufferings taught him about God’s love?

3. How does God’s love work to generate emotions like love, hope, and peace in God’s people?

4. When have you seen Coercion, Competition, and Cooperation in church cultures? How did you feel in the presence of each?

5. Of the four things God’s love does for us, which feels most impactful to you? Why?

Fleming Rutledge, “The Enemy Lines Are Hard to Find,” in William H. Willimon, ed., Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 342-347.

Jennifer Strawbridge, Jarred Mercer, Peter Groves, Love Makes No Sense: An Invitation to Christian Theology (London: SCM, 2019).

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