by Mason Puckett

A funeral. A widow. A mom with no son now. This is the scene in the town of Nain when Jesus enters (Luke 7:11-17). As soon as Jesus shows up, Luke immediately tells us everything that is disheartening about this mourning mom’s situation. She’s already buried her husband. Now she’s burying her only son. In this ancient context, a woman was typically reliant on the man in her life for economic stability. In the absence of her husband, she would…

A new Exodus! God’s people have been freed from sin and death. We have trekked our baptismal path through Jesus’ death and resurrection and have arrived at newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin (Romans 6:1-14). But Paul isn’t finished yet, and this discussion of freedom from our slavery to sin is about to take a strange turn. To belong to Christ is to be freed from the enslaving gravity of sin. However, Paul still describes our new, baptized…

I don’t know about you, but I experience a bit of whiplash when reading Romans, especially chapters 5-6. Paul is doing such a masterful job of defining for us reality as it really is. Reality according to Romans 5-6 is this: God is perfectly at peace with us and perfectly reconciled to us. Grace has defeated (humiliated!) sin and death. Baptism has immersed us into the death and new life of Jesus. What it means for us to be human…

How much time do we spend being disappointed in ourselves for not being able to move past our old and tired ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving? We desire to think, speak, and behave in ways that belong to a new way of being human, and we are regularly discouraged that it’s not happening sooner. Except, it is happening, nay, already did! Paul in Romans 6 makes an astonishing, impossible declaration. “We who died to sin cannot go on living…

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…

Psalm 32 begins with, “Happy [or, Blessed] are those whose transgression is forgiven.” We see this here and there in scripture and we know what to call it: beatitude, a pronouncement of what the good life, the happy life looks like. If you ask Psalm 32, the happy, blessed life is to experience forgiveness, to receive the good news that God is looking at you and seeing something other than the mistakes you’ve made. And this is nothing short of…

Through the first three chapters of Romans, Paul has much to say about the faithfulness of God and of Jesus. And when we get to Romans 4, we finally read specifically of what we mean when we talk about God’s faithfulness – faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15). Since Abraham, God has been on a mission to bless the whole world, and that mission has never faltered (even though we humans mess it up plenty). As proclaimed in…

One of the apostle Paul’s favorite Bible stories comes in Genesis 15. For what Paul has to say about faith as the defining trait of those who belong to the family of God in Jesus Christ, he goes back to the beginning where all the talk of faith and God’s family began. In Genesis 15, God has already made a shocking and scandalous promise to Abraham, that Abraham will have a family and use that family to bless “all the…

At any given moment in the book of Romans, the author Paul is trying to convey at least one of three things: first, God’s faithfulness to the covenant he made with Abraham (Genesis 12 & 15); second, the new Exodus, our once for all deliverance from all that would enslave us and separate us from God; and third, the establishment of the one church that belongs to Jesus (composed equally of Jew and Gentile). When Romans gets dense and difficult,…