After a time away from intense and intention Bible study (translation: “I haven’t been reading the Bible much until recently.”), I have been slowly reading through Romans. It has been refreshing and mind-blowing to see things in there that I hadn’t seen before, and that I haven’t really heard anyone preach out of Paul’s letter to Rome. Here are a few things that have jumped out at me in the last week or so. Enjoy.
Romans 1:4 – “[Jesus] who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of Holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord…“
Even in his introduction, Paul is dropping revelations. I never noticed that the resurrection from the dead was the declaration that He is divine. And he says that it is “according to the Spirit of Holiness”, which I have touched on before, but will reiterate here. Jesus was called “holy” by an angel before He ever did anything to merit the attribute of holiness (if indeed holiness has anything to do with actions). It is because He was already born of the Spirit that He was holy – “holy” being His nature, and our new nature when we are born again. So Jesus is resurrected, thus proving His divinity, which happened as a result of Him being conceived and born of the Spirit.
Romans 4:25 – “He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification.“
This one is still in theory-mode for me, but it is awesome. I am about to graduate from MorningStar University. This will happen because I have spent 2 years here and participated in the program. It is kind of like a cause-effect relationship. Cause: 2 years in the program; Effect: graduation with a certificate of Christian Ministry from UNC-C. Now, the first part of Romans 4:25 is easy to get the cause and effect understanding. Cause: our transgressions; Effect: Jesus is delivered over to die. The first transgression – Adam in Eden – was enough of a cause, the subsequent transgressions are symptoms of that original falling. So the transgression happens and then the Cross is the necessary result in the heart of God.
But the second half of the verse is what is intriguing. Cause: our justification; Effect: Jesus is raised from the dead. The interesting thing is the timing between the two. If the cause is our justification, then that means that our justification must have happened before Jesus raised from the dead. I have grown up in the church believing that, basically, our justification was not complete until He was raised from the dead.
Now here is where it gets theoretical. I believe (or am beginning to believe) that we were justified or “made right with God” in the heart of Jesus before any of this happened. Jesus, being God, had decided that we were meant to be right with God, thus we were justified already and it was only a matter of proving that justification. John 3:16 says that God already loved the world and so he sent Jesus. It doesn’t say He was supremely and understandably ticked off at the world and didn’t want to give the devil something to boast about, so He sent Jesus to satisfy a law that God is held to so that He wouldn’t look bad. It was the love in God that caused the whole thing to go down. So, because we were already justified in Jesus’ mind, we therefore had to be shown that and Jesus demonstrated His love for us in the Cross. The Cross was not about wrath, it was about love, just as us picking up our cross is not a matter of us keeping Him happy, it is a matter of us loving Him.
Romans 7:1-4 – not quoted, pull out your Bible and look at it.
Basically, Paul draws a parallel between a woman who is married to a man who dies and is remarried to another man to our relationship to Christ. The strange thing here is that the first man that she is married to is connected to Christ, whose body died and therefore she was released from the law of marriage and adultery. This signifies us being freed from the Law. But then the analogous woman (mankind) remarries “another man”. Who is the other man that we marry after the death of Christ? In verse 4, Paul says that we are joined to “another” to “Him who was raised from the dead”, meaning Jesus.
It looks to me, at this point, that Jesus is a different person before and after His death and resurrection. It is as if His baptism into death, of which we partake in our own baptism in water, changed Him fully into a new man, just like we bury our old man in baptism and are raised up new creations, supernatural beings with all the power of the Creator resident inside of us. Just the other night I baptized a guy who got saved that night at one of our services at church, he came in an agnostic and left a different person. We took him back to my house, and while we were filling up the tub to baptize him, I told him about how some times people get baptized and lose all their addictions at the bottom of the tub, coming up free. He told us “I’m not going to change myself, I’m still going to smoke pot and party.” I said to him, “That’s cool. You will begin to find out what helps and hurts your life and relationship with Jesus and you will not want to do those things that hurt your life and relationship.”
So how come we don’t come up in full glory after being baptized like Jesus came up a new man? I think it is because we still have to workout our salvation, realizing who and what we are. We are new creations, but we just aren’t acting like it. That’s why Christians are still able to do sinful things, even though we are sinless. We are simply acting like our old nature because we have not matured into fullness. Jesus was matured and filled with understanding of who He is, we are being transformed into His image and likeness.
So take heart, press through and don’t hold onto the pressure that compels you to do things to be right with God or become a better person. Act like the person you are becoming, which is Jesus, not out of pressure, but out of your new, divine nature that we call “holiness”.
