Read: Romans 1:18-32 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
No one has ever called St Paul’s teaching – or his method of argument – easy! Here we find ourselves at the first ‘difficult’ passage in Romans. After the encouragement and joy of the first half of the chapter, to find ourselves suddenly dealing with God’s wrath and human sinfulness can feel like it comes out of left field.
But for Paul, the ostensibly negative themes of sin and God’s wrath are precisely the logical flip-side to all the previous positive themes of his letter.
The reason Paul has been able to rejoice with and encourage the Roman Christians is because they share with him a conviction that it is only faith in Christ that matters now; nothing else holds them back or divides them. But one of the reasons that nothing else holds them back or divides them is that they all share the same need for Christ, too. For, he insists, all human beings are, in their own strength, equally sinful and equally hopeless. Each and every one of us has fallen equally short of what God desires from us.
In the light of the gospel, Paul sees our equal hopelessness as fundamentally good news: we’re all in the same boat; God loves all of us equally; the same hope of salvation is extended to all of us. It doesn’t matter if we have the religious pedigree of a great saint or are the worst of criminals: from God’s perspective, every one of us needs the same salvation, and every one of us is offered the same salvation in Christ. It is not what we have done or who we are that matters. It is only faith in Christ that matters now.
In order to rejoice properly in how great a salvation God has given us in Christ, we need to be realistic about how far we have fallen. And because of that, Paul doesn’t consider God’s wrath something to shrink from.
Lent is traditionally the time when Christians take stock of their sinfulness, revisit the question of just how far we have fallen, so that we can (with Paul) rejoice at just how great a salvation it is that we are offered in Christ. So let us examine ourselves – because now that Christ has saved us, our sinfulness is no longer the bad news it once was.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.