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 rectified) by his blood. Whatever barriers existed between us and God, we have received reconciliation with him.
None of this is left to still take place. None of it sits waiting in the future tense. God did all of this. Already. We’re not waiting for it. It’s all true, right here and now. God is perfectly at peace with us. By his grace, he has pulled us close to him. His love is already in our hearts because he already put it there. Our relationship to him is not broken or out of joint, but is completely healed, completely reconciled. There may be a voice creeping in right now, telling us that this can’t possibly be true. Surely we’re still too broken for God to feel perfectly at peace with us. But that negative voice is the voice of the enemy, attempting to put us to sleep to the truth of the love, peace and reconciliation that are already ours.
Everything that we need to happen, already happened. We spend a lot of time and energy focusing on the future tense, the stuff that hasn’t happened yet, anticipating the things we’re excited for, dreading the things that scare us. The future tense has its time and place, but here in Romans 5 we are rejoicing in the things we don’t have to wait for. God has brought us close. His grace has flooded our lives, free of charge. God has created peace with us. His love has been poured out. None of this is for us to accomplish because Jesus already did it.
So why is it that this all feels a little too good to be true? And why, if God has already rectified us and healed us, do we still feel so broken, hurt, sinful, and lost? Most of our problems, mistakes, insecurities, and fears are born out of forgetfulness, a sleepy forgetting of what God already did, what is already true, that God is already close and has created peace. Our calling is not to manufacture peace with God, or to astutely locate the path of access into his grace. Instead, we are to remember what Jesus did, not what we feel a nervous need to accomplish. We are to wake up to reality as it really is, not as the enemy would have us dread it to be.
On the cross, Jesus took into his body every source of sin, hate, injustice, division, and violence that stood between us and God. Jesus took it, all of it, into himself and off of us. There is nothing left to disrupt the peace that God has with us. “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us, and we have now been made right by his blood.” (Romans 5:8-9) That is what’s already true. Let us remember. Let us be awake. Let us joyfully receive the gift of the past tense.
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