When we read Romans 5, it’s like sin is a spreading sickness and Adam is patient zero. To exist under the power of sin is simply an undeniable part of what it means to be human. It’s been in our DNA since the first human being. And where there is sin, death is nearby. Death is sin’s partner, the great sign that God’s project of breathing new life into existence has been contaminated. Sin and death have “reigned,” says Romans…

There is a gift we receive from the apostle Paul that I don’t think he gets enough credit for – the gift of the past tense. This gift is on full display all over Paul’s letters, including Romans 5. We have peace with God and have obtained free access to his grace. God has poured his love into our hearts. Christ died for all of us sinners, and we have been justified (that is, our relationship to him has been…

I think it’s worthwhile to read Romans “backwards,” that is, viewing the whole letter through the lens of its later chapters in which the worshiping community in Rome itself comes to the fore of Paul’s attention. Everything that is rich and challenging in Romans eventually adds up to the (strained) relationships between the members of the church. “Let us no longer pass judgment on one another,” Paul says in Romans 14:13. The whole letter has been working its way toward…

In Romans 4, our eyes are opened to the God of miracles, the God who calls Abraham out of obscurity and makes impossible promises to him – and keeps them! It is the same God of Psalm 32, who forgives sins not because we, in our wisdom and effort, convince him to do it but because it is simply in his nature to forgive. The God of miracles is the ancestry of the Church. Paul alerts us to this ancestry…