Thursday • 3/11/2021
Week of 3 Lent

This morning’s Scriptures are: (Psalm 83); Psalm 42; Psalm 43; Jeremiah 10:11–24; Romans 5:12–21; John 8:21–32

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Romans: Christ and Paradise Regained. 

The most revealing words Paul ever wrote just may be these: “…Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:14). Paul’s entire perspective on life, on the world, and on us lies in these words. In sum, Paul is developing for us the central story of the Bible: in Adam, paradise is lost. In Christ, paradise is regained. Adam’s disobedience had led to the dissolution of the human race. Christ’s obedience leads to its restoration. 

Think back to Romans 4, and the way that Abraham is to be an example to us of faith (4:12). In several ways, Abraham’s faith in Romans 4 stands in contrast to the faithlessness of the human race as Paul outlined it in Romans 1. 

• While humans had ignored God their Creator (1:20,25), Abraham believes in God who gives life and calls things “that are not” into “being” (4:17).

• Humans did not glorify God as God (1:21). But Abraham, being made strong in faith, gives glory to God (4:20). 

Though they are fully aware of God’s power (dunamis), humans refused him worship and thanks (1:20). Abraham, however, is fully convinced that God has the power (dunatos) to do what he has promised. Abraham does not doubt.*

Abraham-like faith was what Yahweh’s people were supposed to bequeath to the whole world. Although they failed to do so, God brought forth, from this faithless nation, Christ, who, according to Romans 4:23–25, was “given over for our transgressions (see Isaiah 53:5,12) and raised for our justification” (Isaiah 53:11,12). What Paul explains in the first half of Romans 5 is that this justification brings peace now, the sure hope of glory later, and an unshakeable confidence in God’s love on the road to that glory. 

Here, in the second half of Romans 5, Paul explains how paradise, lost in Adam, is regained in Christ. The reason we can have peace, hope, and confidence is that Christ has more than made up for Adam’s fall, and has more than made up for its fallout as well. In today’s passage from Romans, Paul makes these points:

• The “fall” was a natural and just consequence of Adam’s disobedience; but the free gift is an extraordinary manifestation of “God’s grace” and his “gracious gift in Christ” (5:15).

• It would have been easy for God to intervene to fix things right after Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit, but God decided to do so only “following many trespasses” (5:16), that is to say, only after the world had become an impossibly tangled, hot mess of sinfulness. God waits to fix things only after they are  seemingly super-unfixable. To him be the glory!

• As Paul summarizes in 5:18: One man, Christ, offers “the one righteous act” (dikaiōma New English Translation) that leads to the “right-wising/justifying/making right” (dikaiōsis) of all. One man, Christ, offers obedience that undoes the first man’s (Adam’s) disobedience. Right now, in the present, “death reigns” because Adam forfeited his (and therefore our) right to rule. When all is said and done, however, “those who receive … the free gift of righteousness [will] reign in life” (5:17 NET). And just as “sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:21 NET).

• Result: the entrance of sin into human experience will only prove, in the end, to have brought about God’s greater grace (5:20–21). 

With Paul’s tour-de-force, he would have us know that because of what Christ has done, everything we have done wrong has been undone. Every hurt we’ve inflicted, he will make up for. Everything that would keep us punishing ourselves, he has forgiven. He has folded into his good design every regret and every bad decision. The paradise that probably every one of us grew up imagining for ourselves, and then eventually learned to despair of—it’s ours in Christ Jesus. And it’s on offer to everyone around us. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

*I am thankful for the analysis of E. Adams, “Abraham’s Faith and Gentile Disobedience: Textual Links Between Romans 1 and 4,” Journal of the Study of the New Testament 65 (1997) 47-66.

Image: The Angel of the Divine Presence Clothing Adam and Eve with Coats of Skins. The William Blake Archive, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.