(Epistle to the Romans Chapter 5)

Paul, in this 5^th chapter of his Roman letter, begins by reminding his readers of what they have already experienced as Christians. Beginning at the first verse, he says: “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and then he goes on in the next few verses to expand this blessing of being at peace with God, to include the grace of God and the hope of a future sharing of the glory of God.

But being “at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” for Paul, means primarily (as he writes in verse 6) a state of well being procured for the believer by the death of Christ. (Romans 5:6-9)

“While we were yet sinners (helpless), at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man — though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God.”

Then in the remainder of this 5^th chapter Paul goes into a lengthy analogy of two crucial characters: Adam and Jesus Christ. By Adam’s disobedience, Paul declares, sin and its concomitant, death, cursed the whole human race. By another man’s obedience, obedience even unto death on a cross, Jesus Christ brought, for all humanity, deliverance, salvation, freedom, life and peace with God.

Now for me, and some others, Paul’s language and thought in these verses is difficult to understand and sometimes tedious and elusive. Paul is certainly dealing with a lot of big, important ideas and doing a deal of name-dropping of famous and scurrilous characters. How are we going to cope with all this mixed menu Paul has put on our plate for this morning breakfast hour?

Just look at what he has set before us: Moses and Adam and Jesus Christ; sin and death, condemnation and justification, God’s law and God’s grace, the impotence of human efforts to please God by keeping perfectly God’s holy and righteous law, and God’s amazing grace in redeeming rebellious, unworthy lawbreakers through the sacrificial death of his son, Jesus Christ.

My suggestion is that we try to come at this chapter and its meaning for us from a practical and personal point of view, rather than from an impersonal, theoretical, philosophical and theological point of view.

I don’t know about you, but for me my most perplexing daily problems are problems in personal relationships. We all have our financial worries, I suppose, especially around income tax payment time; and even the folks who have high school algebra far behind them still find they must wrestle with some abstract problems in engineering, or surgery, or business trends, or what have you — but far and away, our most persistent and knotty problems are those in personal relationships.

How to establish a basis of happy and mutually rewarding relationships between employer and employees; how to work out that most intimate and sensitive relationship between husband and wife; how to develop a tolerable pattern of life within a home, where a whole family can live together in love, with the right amount of respect and consideration for every person involved without any taking advantage of the other, and where the pattern of relationships remain not static, but flexible enough to meet the needs of developing personalities who are slowly taking over more and more control of their lives. How to deal with one’s friends, not even to mention one’s enemies, is a permanent problem, many sided and never completely solved, daily laying strenuous demands upon each of us.

Now in the Christian faith there are two great symbols, the Ten Commandments and The Cross, which, if kept ever before us and firmly fixed in contact with each personal relationship, would give us more help in solving these problems than anything I know about. It is these two great realities that Paul is wrestling with in this fifth chapter of Romans and, indeed, in the whole of this Epistle — the Commandments and the Cross.

These form the two fixed poles of our religious life — the Commandments and the Cross. Here is the north pole of our spiritual life: the stone tablets upon which Moses recorded the divine standards for human conduct. Then over against the Commandments, at the south pole of our religious life, there stands eternally the Cross of Calvary, on which the Savior died, revealing the amazing merciful forgiveness of God. Our lives revolve on this axis. All our personal relationships must be kept ever within that orbit — always feeling the tug of both the Commandments and the Cross, or our relationships will go on the rocks. The light and influence of the Commandments: of justice, righteousness and duty — must exert a steady pull on every human relationship; but so also must each relationship come under the light and influence of the Cross, with its love, forgiveness, and compassion.

The plot of an English play, The Holly and the Ivy, brought this very forcibly to my attention. The story is about a British parson whose children cannot “tell him the truth” about themselves because he is a parson, and that builds a wall between them so that there is no real sharing and no genuine person to person relationships in the family.

The younger daughter who went away to London to work fell in love with a young soldier who was killed. Soon she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. Because she knows her family would disapprove of her conduct as contrary to their standards, she does not tell them the truth about herself, but bears all alone. Her child, whom they never see or know about, dies at four of meningitis and she becomes an alcoholic because she cannot bear the emptiness of her life alone.

The youngest son becomes a rotter who lies to his bosses and holds his family in contempt, because he had grown up in an atmosphere where he couldn’t tell the old man the truth.

The oldest daughter, devoted to her widowed father, impelled by a high sense of duty, feels it her place to stay at home and take care of the aging man in the rectory. This she does at great personal sacrifice, even to the point of giving up her hope of marriage to the fine young engineer who asks her to sail away with him to South America to take the big job opportunity of his life which has just come. The daughter, however, will not go, will not even mention it to her father, because he is one “who can’t be told the truth.”

The story poses the crucial problem in human relationships for every family — for all parents and children: how far can one go in holding up an ideal of circumspect moral conduct, and of filial obedience in our families, without stretching to the breaking point our ties of open, frank discussion and understanding between each member of the family?

Our only solution for this, and every kindred problem in personal relationships, is to be found in bringing each relationship into contact with both the Commandments and the Cross. Look first at the Commandments. What is their meaning — their pull — on our world of relationships?

Eternal God, our loving heavenly Father, has set up his standards of perfect righteousness — the highest possible moral code — for the guiding of our lives. He has pulled no punches with us. His laws are revealed in the scriptures — they are graven in the granite of the universe. “Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal, lie, or covet. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.”

“The Maker’s laws,” said Thomas Carlyle, “whether they are promulgated in Sinai thunder, to the ear or imagination, are the laws of God; transcendent, everlasting, demanding obedience from all people. The universe is made by law; the Great Soul of the world is just and not unjust.”

Why does God lay out His code in such clear, uncompromising language? There are at least three reasons and they are all reasons which impinge on personal relationships.

First, God wants to express His personality, to communicate the nature of His character to His own that they may know what sort of character He is. This is the rock bottom desire of all personality — to reveal itself. When the lover makes love to his beloved he is just trying to reveal what is in his heart. When the father tells his son what his code of conduct and honor is, he is trying to reveal to his son what sort of man he is. God wants all humanity to know His heart. God is a moral being, so He reveals that personality in the Ten Commandments.

But more, God wants us to be like Him — to strive for perfection. That’s the second reason for giving the Commandments. God knows that only through obedience to these laws will we find felicity in this life. “The way of the transgressor is hard.” Sin destroys. The wages of sin is death. Dissipation depletes personality. God knows that the best life has to offer us is to be found on the road of obedience, not just for obedience sake, but because this is the road, the only road, that stretches to life eternal. So God reveals the road which will bring us to the golden palace of our heart’s desire.

But the third and most important reason of all that God has given us the Ten Commandments is that He wants us to enter into fellowship with Him; to come to a person to person relationship with the Eternal; and this is possible only if there is understanding and similarity of nature. “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” asks the prophet Amos. And Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, asks them: “What fellowship can righteousness have with unrighteousness, and what communion can light have with darkness?”

The whole setting, of the story in Exodus of God’s giving the Commandments, reveals that His purpose was to establish a covenant relationship with His people. The giving of the law was in order that God and man might enter into a person to person relationship.

But what happens when God’s earnest attempt to reveal Himself through His moral code fails, when His hope of fashioning the shape of our character by law is dashed, when His desire to enter into fellowship with a righteous, covenant people is frustrated? What happens when we rebel against the standards, give ourselves to all forms of immorality and grow into contemptible creatures, hideous in God’s sight, and are unfit and incapable of fellowship with God? Does God give us up? Does the Eternal shrug His shoulders and say: “Well, I tried. I showed the way. I offered them life with me. If they will not have heaven, then let them take their hell.” No, God does not so quickly give us up as that. He goes even farther than the Commandments. He has yet the Cross. And in the gracious figure of His well loved son, He climbs Calvary’s hill.

So God has set up the Cross eternally as another fixed pole and point of reference for all personal relationships. We who have failed to keep the moral code are yet sought by God while we are still in our sin. But mind you, God has not torn down His Commandments, nor soft-pedaled their proclamation in prophetic blasts against sin. But God, the righteous, opens up a way for sinful creatures who failed the standards of perfection through the mercy He has shown in the sacrifice of the Son of God, so that fellowship and forgiveness may be restored to any penitent rebel.

“God is creative love,” declared James Stewart, “and if God wishes to forgive, which means to create a new situation for the sinful, who is to say He cannot? If the father longs to welcome home the lost child and to restore the broken relationship, who dares to say he must do nothing of the kind?” (James Stewart)

When Flora Campbell rebelled against the harsh standards of her straight-laced father in her Scottish Highland home and ran away to London, it was the message of the Cross, set in the parable of the prodigal son, that brought her home again and restored the old relationship. Running in her ears were the messages of eternal love which over-leaps every breach of duty and chasm of neglect — “you are missed, you are missed, you are missed.” If a shepherd was counting his sheep and there was one short, does he not go out to the hill and seek it? If a father has a child and she left her home and lost herself in the wicked city, she will be missed, remembered in the old house, and her chair will be there. (add author)

God wants us. He wants us clean and pure and close to His heart in loving obedience every day. He wants us that way for our joy and His glory. That’s the proclamation of the Commandments.

But if we fail Him, if we slip into sin and spoil His plans for us and break His heart and blacken the face of His earth with the cruel rebellion of our selfish hearts, still He wants us and by the sacrifice of Christ He seeks us and offers us pardon, if we will repent and try again. However, whenever, He wants us. We are missed. That is the call of the Cross.

And though we frail creatures can never match either the righteousness nor the mercy of our gracious Father in heaven, yet the standard for us to shoot at in all our human relationships is set up in these wonderful symbols of our faith — the Commandments and the Cross. In their light we must seek to order our lives, bringing each turbulent relationship under God’s judgment of the Commandments and the Cross.