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 5. Scripture is frequently interested in the question of who is in charge; not within the worshipping community, but in the cosmos. What is the true force at work to exercise its rule and authority over all else? Sin and death had quite a run as the defending heavyweight champs.
But: grace.
Grace, or its synonym, gift, appears eight times in Romans 5:12-21. Paul even utters the phrase “the grace of God and the gift in the grace…”
Grace is the Bible’s word for God’s resolve to not sit on his hands. Grace is the initiating action of God. Grace means that it was God’s idea first. Whatever barriers we put up between ourselves and God, God does not wait for us to take them back down. Grace is the determination of God to smash through those barriers and create healing, peace, and blessing before we ever thought to ask for them. That’s why Paul uses “grace” and “gift” interchangeably. God’s healing love is a gift, not something we purchased or earned, but something that flows freely and abundantly from God’s heart. We can even call this grace apocalyptic, which does not have anything to do with the end of the world. Apocalyptic means that God has pulled back the curtain and revealed something to us that we would not have figured out on our own. Grace is inherently apocalyptic because it is God’s unprompted movement toward us, the unearned presence and healing of God in our lives. That’s why Jesus’ death on the cross is the ultimate act of grace. We did not convince or coerce Jesus to do it. It was purely a gift, the gift of his very life.
God is eager to get to us. It makes God happy to intervene in our lives with joy, healing, generosity, and transformation. God is not content to do his part in the work of healing and transformation and then wait for us to catch up. He is going to freely give his whole self to us without any prompting or purchase.
Nothing else in the world sounds like this. Everything besides the gospel runs on the engine of consumerism, telling us that joy and healing are somewhere around the corner, after we get the raise or the relationship, after we lose the weight or find the solution to a problem. But grace is simply different. In grace we see the God who does not make us promises that are contingent on our ability to meet him halfway, but who has already moved in our direction and healed the sickness of sin, creating peace and reconciliation (as he described in the first half of Romans 5).
Grace reigns (5:21). Grace is in charge. The grace of God has already decided who we are. The healing, transforming grace of God is just too much for sin and death to handle. Sin does not rule over us. Grace does. Let this grace reclaim our hearts and imaginations from the false gospel of sin and consumerism, thereby freeing us to freely receive the free gift of the God who has already healed us.
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