The Glorious Results

The glorious results. The fifth chapter opens with a glorious summary of the results of what has gone before. Being justified by faith, we (for it is all personal now) who, as to our past, where enemies in our minds by wicked works, have peace with God through Jesus Christ who has become our Lord; by whom, too, as to our present, we have access by faith into this Divine acceptance in which we stand; and, as to our future we rejoice* in hope of the glory of God.

Joy in hope of glory; Joy in tribulations. The cross whereon our sins were borne is behind us; the unclouded smile of God’s favor rests unceasingly on us now; and the hope of the glory lies before. The very thing which we most dreaded, the glory of God, the very thing before which we were seen to come short in chapter 3, has become that which our souls can anticipate with holy joy. And not only so, but we are enabled to rejoice even in tribulations, the needed discipline which our God sees fit to give us, knowing that just in proportion as we learn in His school, our tribulations work in us patience, submission to His will, and patience works in us deeper experience of His ways and resources in the wilderness; and experience, in turn, works in us hope of a happy issue—a hope which knows no disappointment, inasmuch as God’s love towards us is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given unto us, and we know thereby that God is doing for us the very best (for nothing short of this could suit His heart of love) in all the circumstances in which we find ourselves; and knowing this, we rise superior to all the trials of the way. What a strange, incomprehensible being the believer should be to the world! It is not that he is not troubled like other men; but what should strike the world in regard to us is this (alas, how little we answer to God’s grace!)—that we are walking through this world as superior to its troubles as to its charms.

Thus the foregoing verses depict believers as a saved people, going, like Israel of old, through the wilderness onward to their rest. Meanwhile God is leading us through the desert, in order to humble us, and to prove us, and to know what is in our hearts. Still He does lead; and though He suffer us to hunger, He feeds us with Christ, the Bread of God which came down from heaven; and makes us know that as a man chasteneth his son, so does our Father chasten us; yet in His loving care He suffers not our raiment to wax old, or our foot to swell (Deut. 8:2–5), tempering in mercy our trials to our strength; and the bitterness of Marah, when once the cross of Christ is brought by faith into it, ever turns to the rest and refreshment of Elim with its palm-trees and wells of water (Exod. 15:23–27).

Here, ’mid these desert sands, we still press on,

Marked by the footprints of our Saviour, gone

Before His pilgrim saints, to find a rest

For them amidst the mansions of the blest!

And yet how oft the desert storms arise

To blot those footprints from our straining eyes;

Or, as we languish ’neath the noontide heat,

The mocking mirage of some cool retreat

Allures our flagging steps, to find dismayed

No springing well, no spreading palm-trees’ shade,

But bleaching bones to warn us, and to tell

Of those, alas, who followed it and fell.

Now it is the death of Christ which gives us the measure of the love of God: for when we were strengthless to help ourselves, in due time (that is, when our impotence to save ourselves had been by a trial of 4000 years’ duration* fully manifested) Christ died for the ungodly. Alas for our poor selfish hearts, we need a motive for all we do; nor is our love for righteousness for its own sake so great that one would die for another’s sake, simply because he was a righteous man; though perhaps for one who had proved himself a good man, a benefactor, some would even dare to die. But God, in blessed contrast with ourselves, commends His love to us in that, while we were—not benefactors, but sinners, and in open enmity, Christ died for us, unlovely as we were. And now that we are justified by His blood, we shall be saved through Him. For if when we were sinners we were reconciled to God by the fact that His Son died, much more shall the salvation of us who are reconciled be assured to us by the fact that Christ now lives on the other side of death and judgment.

Joy in God. Nor is this all; the highest rung on the believer’s ladder of blessing has not yet been reached: we have seen him joy in hope of the glory of God; we have seen him rise superior to trials, and joy in them; but, as if this were not enough, we find him here joying in God Himself, enabled to do so through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation.*

What a blessed thought for us, that nothing short of this would suit God’s heart of love, for He would be Himself the object of our hearts, the object of His creatures’ joy! Our guilty fears are left forever in the tomb of Christ, for Christ is risen from among the dead; and blessedly, in the midst of this our joy, the Spirit leads our souls back to Him whose work was the basis of it all. We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation.

* Note that the word translated “rejoice” in verse 2, “glory” in verse 3, and “joy” in verse 11, are all the same in the original. We rejoice in hope of the glory;—not only so, but we rejoice in present tribulations;—not only so, but we rejoice in God Himself.

* See Appendix A.

* Note that the word translated “atonement” should be “reconciliation,” and connects with the word “reconciled” in verse 10.

Fort, J. (n.d.). God’s Salvation: Being the Sinner’s Justification and the Saint’s Deliverance as Set Forth in the Epistle to the Romans (New Edition, Revised, pp. 33–36). Loizeaux Brothers, Publishers. (Public Domain)