NOTES for Rom 5:1-11
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.