Daily Liturgy and Scripture

Paul has been working out the idea of grace and salvation, our status with God and our identity in Christ. Now he makes another thing clear: that salvation is God’s alone, we are not earning it. This should be the best of news, because we cannot be taken away from him.

Good news to finish Paul’s thought: even though the Law brought awareness of sin and the closeness of death, we have Christ. With the Spirit dwelling within us and Christ working through us, the death of the law need not govern us. We have the Spirit of Life, and that is made possible because of the victory of Christ.

Paul is still building his message. The cross is for all, we all enter by faith. But now he comes back a step: the work the law is only to point out the sin in our lives, it cannot give life. He makes that point with his discussion on coveting. Don’t give up, though. This chapter talks about a sort of hopeless situation with the Law, but chapter 8 will complete the thought.

Paul has made two steps from the previous chapters to get her: because of Christ, both Jews and Gentiles are saved through faith like that of Abraham. Because of that faith, salvation is Gods; it is not because of anything we do. The next step seems pretty logical. Because God has done that work, doesn’t that mean that we’re pretty much off the hook? Can’t we do what we want anyway, because God will save us of his own accord? But of course that is not what a redeemed life looks like. If we died with Christ, we died to sin. Life in Christ is free from that slavery, and so we should no longer be bound to that life. It is part of our past, and Jesus is our future. That should motivate us for a very different present.

It the last chapter, Paul talked about how Jew and Gentile both enter the presence of God by faith. Now he takes it a step further: once in the presence of God, we have the work of Christ bringing salvation. Just as Adam brought the Fall, so one man rises from that Fall, and that is always Jesus. We need no other source of redemption.

God's design for his children was always that they have faith in his salvation. This was the thing that Abraham had both before and after the promise was made by God, and it is the pattern for us today. As Paul discusses, it is common to both Jews and Gentiles. Jews have the promise of Abraham that includes his faith, and Gentiles can show faith in the same way as Abraham did.

Paul is making the ground at the foot of the cross level. Speaking as a Jew, it means a lot that he folds in the promise of Abraham into the Gentiles. That would have probably still been a little scandalous among many Jews. It’s also a somewhat turbulent time in Rome, the city to which Paul wrote. Jews had actually been expelled from the city during Paul’s life, and there probably would have been tension between them and other groups. He brings that all to Christ in this part of the letter, because only in Christ are all redeemed.

At the end of chapter 1, Paul made a list of ways that people fail to honor God: everything from sexual sins to disobeying parents. This is a pretty wide range, and we would certainly treat those two things very differently. But now he brings that list into a different light: we are all sinners before God, equally broken. We cannot judge, we must leave that work to God. He also brings his Jewish upbringing into the picture as well, pointing out that both Jew and Gentile find condemnation and redemption. It’s an attempt at unity that we might be wise to mimic.

Paul starts off his letter to the Christians in Rome by departing from his Jewish scholarship and appealing more to the Word the the Spirit writes on their hearts. The Spirit has the ability to move us, but we certainly have the capacity to move against it. When we do so, we take on a long list of qualities, and Paul names several. If we wish to be closer to God’s heart, it’s not a bad idea to keep a lookout for those things in our life.

A spiritual father is still accountable to keep his flock focused on the right thing, and Paul has scolded the Corinthians many times throughout this letter. As he ends the letter, his frustration with them remains unhidden. This is difficult to hear if we're looking for positivity and encouragement, but we need a person in our lives who is willing to be that real with us, even better if it happens to be someone who tries to model Jesus when they do so. That was certainly Paul: while he was stern, his concern was always for the good of the Church.