Romans Chapter 5/Chapter 6
In addition, it may seem strange, but God purposefully instituted the Mosaic legal system to flush the sinful nature out of hiding which resulted in more sinning. Yet this all the more magnified the sin-conquering grace of God. (I'll expand on this theme later.) Before Christ, sin ruled and death was dominant, but now through Jesus our Lord, grace rules- enthroned by the dominating righteousness that leads to eternal life.
Chapter 6 (sometimes humanly determined chapter breaks are not very helpful!)
Now I know what you're tempted to think. "If this is true, then we might as well sin more so that God's grace can continue to be magnified." Right? Wrong! You see, we live in a whole new era and new dynamics are now at work. For us, to deliberately live in sin is out of the question because we are actually dead to the whole dominion of sin.
Comments:
Paul touches on an important natural response in people's hearts and minds to the amazing-ness of God's grace. (This grace that boldly stares our sin in the face, is not shocked or dissuaded in the least and totally moves in to trump all our guilt and shame.) I think it's awesome that Paul gives voice in his letter to such natural thinking and the fact that he brings it to light only causes the authenticity of the gospel to rise all the more for me.
When the absolute "free" nature of God's gift of forgiveness and new life to us in Jesus hits our hearts, shortly thereafter, we begin to wonder about the future sins and failures we are certain to experience. And...if God will not hold them, along with our past compromises, against us...what will actually motivate us, or "others" to whom we preach, (after all, we don't like to make the inner conversation about such dark thoughts too personal!) to not give in to temptations to sinful self-gratification? Don't we also need some extra terrifying threats to hover over our heads to keep us in line on a moment by moment basis? (The serious warnings of the New Testament are reserved for people who are in danger of rejecting faith in Jesus.)
Instead, Paul comes at countering such dark thoughts from a different and refreshing angle. He doesn't argue for restricting our freedom to keep us in check, but instead, he argues for us to embrace and enjoy an even greater awareness of our freedom. So free are we, in fact, that we are now "dead" to the tyranny of sin. The apostle doesn't urge us to fearfully obsess about, "How can I not sin?" and/or "What if I lose my salvation?"...as we easily might lose the key to our car. Rather, we are to calmly reason, "Why would I really want to continue to give myself to sin?" and then make our daily choices from remembering the answer that turns out to be a "no-brainer". Sin, of course, is not satisfying to the human soul (though, assuredly, it continually poses as if it were!) and this is why we turned away from it to Jesus in the first place.
More to come....
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