Speaking about a person's relationship with God and with Christ, and starting from the fact that these relationships are primary and determine everything else, Paul also points out that they are primary...
Speaking about a person's relationship with God and with Christ, and starting from the fact that these relationships are primary and determine everything else, Paul also points out that they are primary for God as well. God Himself initiated the process in which a person takes part insofar as he trusts Christ. But when Christ Himself came into this world, He could count on no one. He did not find righteous people ready to follow Him, nor did He count on finding them.
Moreover, when He was dying on the cross, even then He had no guarantees: His disciples were completely unprepared for His death, just as they were for His resurrection. He died not for His disciples and followers, but for those who could still become His disciples and followers. Not for actual righteous people, but for potential righteous people, who at the hour of His death were still sinners. Such relationships, aimed at later spiritual growth, are always a kind of advance. And God is ready to give us this advance. He expects us to prove worthy of it. But we can do that only under two conditions: first, the advance must be accepted, and second, it must be used for its intended purpose, not wasted.
With the first condition in mind, Paul says that God accepts us in Christ and together with Him at least because He sends Christ specifically for us, to save us from destruction as we are. And God, of course, knows perfectly well what we are. And if the Messiah, fulfilling God's will, is ready even to die for us as we are, then now that we have received Him and entrusted ourselves to Him, He will certainly not abandon us; otherwise His own earthly path and His death would lose all meaning. But this is only one side of the matter.
The other side is that following the Messiah means changing. He called us to follow Him as we are and gave us the possibility of new life. But if we remain as we are, our new life will very soon stop being new and become the same as the old one. To keep that from happening, we must change inwardly. We must use the advance God has given. The life of a Christian is not passive waiting for salvation and not religious activity, but a spiritual path.
It is the path of inward formation, the cultivation within ourselves of the spiritual core that is called the inner Torah. Schematically, the apostle describes it as a path from trials to steadfastness, from steadfastness to proven character, and from proven character to hope. Indeed, if the inner Torah is connected above all with perceiving God's will, God's intentions, as a spiritual and moral imperative, then concrete life situations, especially difficult ones, teach us how to follow this imperative in practice.
The result of this training is a formed habit of following God's will, a kind of skill in righteous living, which traditional texts of the sages call wisdom, though Paul prefers to call it proven character or skill. This very skill gives hope that the path will be walked to the end; otherwise one would have to forget about full spiritual life. A person who loses sight of God's will at every upheaval of life cannot live a full spiritual life. As we can see, salvation is a divine-human process, and the apostle understands this perfectly.
5
5:1 Being justified by faith - This is the sum of the preceding chapters. We have peace with God - Being enemies to God no longer, Rom 5:10; neither fearing his wrath, Rom 5:9.We have peace, hope, love, and power over sin, the sum of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters. These are the fruits of justifying faith: where these are not, that faith is not.
5:2 Into this grace - This state of favour.
5:3 We glory in tribulations also - Which we are so far from esteeming a mark of God's displeasure, that we receive them as tokens of his fatherly love, whereby we are prepared for a more exalted happiness. The Jews objected to the persecuted state of the Christians as inconsistent with the people of the Messiah. It is therefore with great propriety that the apostle so often mentions the blessings arising from this very thing.
5:4 And patience works more experience of the sincerity of our grace, and of God's power and faithfulness.
5:5 Hope shameth us not - That is, gives us the highest glorying. We glory in this our hope, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts - The divine conviction of God's love to us, and that love to God which is both the earnest and the beginning of heaven. By the Holy Ghost - The efficient cause of all these present blessings, and the earnest of those to come.
5:6 How can we now doubt of God's love? For when we were without strength - Either to think, will, or do anything good.In due time - Neither too soon nor too late; but in that very point of time which the wisdom of God knew to be more proper than any other. Christ died for the ungodly - Not only to set them a pattern, or to procure them power to follow it. It does not appear that this expression, of dying for any one, has any other signification than that of rescuing the life of another by laying down our own.
5:7 A just man - One who gives to all what is strictly their due The good man - One who is eminently holy; full of love, of compassion, kindness, mildness, of every heavenly and amiable temper. Perhaps - one - would - even - dare to die - Every word increases the strangeness of the thing, and declares even this to be something great and unusual.
5:8 But God recommendeth - A most elegant expression.Those are wont to be recommended to us, who were before either unknown to, or alienated from, us. While we were sinners - So far from being good, that we were not even just.
5:9 By his blood - By his bloodshedding. We shall be saved from wrath through him - That is, from all the effects of the wrath of God. But is there then wrath in God? Is not wrath a human passion? And how can this human passion be in God? We may answer this by another question: Is not love a human passion? And how can this human passion be in God? But to answer directly: wrath in man, and so love in man, is a human passion. But wrath in God is not a human passion; nor is love, as it is in God.Therefore the inspired writers ascribe both the one and the other to God only in an analogical sense.
5:10 If - As sure as; so the word frequently signifies; particularly in this and the eighth chapter. We shalt be saved - Sanctified and glorified. Through his life - Who "ever livethto make intercession for us."
5:11 And not only so, but we also glory - The whole sentence, from the third to the eleventh verse, may be taken together thus: We not only "rejoice in hope of the glory of God," but also in the midst of tribulations we glory in God himself through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation.