Jesus, Paul testifies, was handed over to death for our sins, because of our sins, to pay the price for our sins, and Jesus was raised for justification, to demonstrate that God has forgiven us, to guarantee our salvation.
“Therefore, since we are justified,” writes Paul—justified by faith—“we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1, NRSV). And Paul goes on to talk about what peace with God means and what it implies and what it makes possible in our lives. The apostle explained that people who have faith in Jesus Christ have already been justified, have already been set right before God, have already been deemed correct by God, have already been reckoned blameless in God’s judgment, have already become acceptable in God’s sight. Paul was able to turn to the difference that that makes in people’s lives. We can get on with living out the life of people who have had God’s love poured into their hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to them. Do we have faith in the salvation that God worked for us on a cruel and gruesome Friday afternoon nearly two thousand years ago? That was when, “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. . . . [R]arely will anyone die for a righteous person . . . But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:6, 7a, 8, NRSV). If we believe that, then the past is over and done, and we can get on with living and loving as people who know that we are free from the consequences of sin. Justification—being made right in God’s sight—is an accomplished fact, not by anything that we have done, but trusting in what God has done. We can get on with dedicating our whole life to living out our gratitude for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ in words and deeds of compassion and mercy and courage and hope.
Paul points to some specific results of our salvation that God has already accomplished. We are no longer enemies of God. We have peace with God. Peace is more than just a cessation of hostilities with another. Peace is a bond of creative harmony between people, genuine reconciliation between adversaries. Many recent events have demonstrated that, though the Cold War is over, the United States and Russia are still not at peace. There is still mutual suspicion. There is still competition. There is still quickness to take offense. Believers do not simply have a truce with God, but genuine peace—and it is all God’s doing. God has pronounced us fully acceptable, not through our keeping of the law, but through God’s sacrifice of his Son. Remarkable! And really living in peace with God means living in peace with everything that God has made and over which God has sovereignty—all of creation. We don’t have to make the peace—God has already done that. It has nothing to do with any efforts of our own. We just need to keep the peace God has given, to enjoy the peace God has created.
Paul also says that we exist in a state of grace. It’s not just God’s kindly attitude toward us. It is God’s active role in our lives—undeserved love, undeserved care, undeserved provision for what we need. And we can even boast that we are created in God’s image and destined for fellowship with God and therefore our firm hope is to be partakers in the glory of God—not sentenced to an eternity of shame, but free to exult forever in the fact that we are children and therefore heirs of the one who created the entire universe. And finally, we know the outcome of whatever suffering we may endure in this life; it cannot destroy us, it cannot defeat us, it cannot make us less in God’s sight or signal that God has abandoned us. So suffering can only make us more like Jesus Christ, who suffered unjustly at the hands of some weak, silly, scared people who worked awfully hard at denying love and rejecting grace and dooming themselves to the failure of trying to save themselves.
I confess that, as a person of Reformed background, it always amuses me to be approached by someone and be asked, “Are you saved?” The implication is that there is something I must do for myself or that they are going to do for me. Paul was quite convinced that no person can possibly justify her- or himself in God’s eyes, as Martin Luther and the other Reformers were also convinced fifteen centuries later. All we can do is to be open to the reconciliation that God has already achieved. Haven’t they heard? The salvation is already accomplished—God has already made me right, blameless, and acceptable through the death of Jesus Christ. That’s the good news. I need only trust the fact of what is already true. It is not a matter of jumping through any additional hoops. It is not a matter of discovering any additional truth.
But we mustn’t think that an answer of “Yes” to the question “Are you saved?” is all that matters. Justification—being regarded as right, blameless, and acceptable—is not the final goal of the Christian life or the end of Christian experience. Justification is only the beginning. To be a Christian—to be so grateful for God’s salvation in Jesus that we dedicate our lives to following and obeying Christ as his disciples—is to be always a work in progress. You and I can never assume that we have arrived at the fullness of what God intends for us to be. We should never think that we have become somehow worthy of Christ having died for us. We must never suppose that the Holy Spirit cannot bring us to a more perfect servanthood in the likeness of Jesus. That is what we declare our goal is when we say “Yes” to the accomplished fact of God’s salvation. It may well involve hardships. But what God has already done for us is the source of our confidence about what God will yet do. This God who has already given us so much, freely and purely from an abundance of love for us, surely will not abandon us or betray our trust.
“Justification” means that God regards us as righteous. That is our faith in something that happened thousands of years before we were even born. But that is only the beginning. We discover, as we grow from our justification into Christ-likeness, that we are surrounded by God’s mercy and supported by God’s care. God’s love becomes the central and determining motive in everything that we do, and we find ourselves in a new, deeper relationship with God who created us for that very purpose. We grow more “saintly,” if you will, more “holy.” And that process, which again is really no work of our own, but the inevitable work of the Holy Spirit, is known in the Bible by another technical word—“sanctification”. It comes from the Latin word meaning “holy” or “sacred.” It is the term that describes our living out the life that God has promised us who believe, of growing up into the freedom that God has given, of becoming more and more like Jesus every day of our lives as more and more we turn away from our own agenda, from self-love and from self-indulgence, to love for God that prompts us to serve others lovingly in the pattern of Christ.
I will not insult your intelligence by claiming that every Christian is growing steadily and effectively and devotedly into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Many of us have known people who, though they did not profess faith in Jesus Christ, were in fact more Christ-like than some every-Sunday worshipers. We have all known baptized people who have not moved beyond the “justification” stage, who, having heard of their salvation in Jesus Christ, failed to grow in love and hope, or other people who somehow think that they have arrived, fully and completely, and deserve specific privileges and claim certain prerogatives. And that is why, technical as they sound and boring as they may seem, these terms that Paul uses—“justification” and “sanctification”—are important to you and me. They keep us mindful that a Christian always should be, and, whether he or she realizes it, always is, a work in progress. The fact that we are not and never will be Jesus Christ does not keep us from striving to be obedient to all that Christ commands. The fact that Jesus Christ is uniquely the Son of God does not dissuade us from discovering all that it means for us to become children of God.
There came a time in Jesus’ earthly career that it was appropriate to pass on and share some of his power and authority to preach and to teach and to heal. Jesus had many followers in the sense of people who sought him out to hear what he had to say and to claim his mercy for their sins and to present their ailments for his cure. They believed he had power to speak truth and forgive transgressions and perform miracles to help people. But Jesus needed apostles who would go out and minister to others he did not have time to reach, disciples to carry on his ministry of preaching and teaching and healing after his death and resurrection. He gathered twelve of his followers “and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. . . . [He told them,] ‘[P]roclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the
