1 Corinthians 3:10 - Romans is the doctrinal foundation upon which believers are to be established in the age of grace. Truth designed to give us stability, is truth designed to give us security. God did not intend that believers be insecure, so the security doctrines come first in God’s building process for his grace-age saints. God stabilizes us in the book of Romans.
Only when we come to see ourselves as God sees us and are able to fully appreciate and understand who God has already made us to be and who he has made us to be in Christ, can we become in our behavior what he wants us to be in that aspect of our lives. When a believer’s behavior is consistently inconsistent with what that believer professes to believe, the answer lies in a failure to fully appreciate one or more aspects of the foundational truths in this blueprint in the book of Romans.
If we understand the foundational concept as we see it presented by Paul here in the book of Romans, that will go a long way in our understanding ourselves and others appropriately. An insecure foundation will always show stress factorization somewhere along the line.
Sound doctrine is the means by which God transforms the thinking of those engaged in the study of his Word rightly divided. As we understand what God accomplished for us, and build upon that foundation the truths of who he has made us to be by placing us into his son, we begin to view ourselves as God views us, and there is great security to be found in doing so.
Romans 3:24 - What made Adam’s sin such a catastrophic loss for the human race is heightened by the fact that people are unable to do anything to alter their sinful condition. Human wisdom, human reasoning would say, “Give us a law. Give us some way to perform. Give us a few balls of our own to hit, so that we might earn back what we lost through Adam.”
God would have to do for the human race, what the human race was totally incapable of doing for themselves. God would of necessity have to credit the righteous faithfulness of someone else to the account of hopeless and helpless human race.
The human race was given a Redeemer and the price the Redeemer paid through the shedding of his blood to ransom the human race was a satisfactory payment to take those sins off the table of God’s justice forever! However, the fact that Jesus Christ became a Redeemer of ALL the human race, does not mean that ALL the human race will accept the gift the Redeemer purchased on their behalf.
To be justified, does not mean to BE perfectly righteous in performance. It also does not mean to become perfectly righteous or even MORE righteous in performance through time, it means having Christ’s perfect righteousness freely credited to the account of the ungodly who believe.
Christ’s faithfulness was the only faithfulness sufficient to merit God’s favor. God used our faith in Christ’s faithfulness as the means whereby he would credit Christ’s righteousness to our account.
Romans 5:8 - So, it is not a question of getting new forgiveness for new sin, we had to have someone take care of that sin issue for us and thank God that he had his son take care of that issue for us; God’s son taking ALL the sins of the human race upon himself and satisfying the Father’s righteous demand for justice for those sins.
Sin, or coming short of the measure of who God is, is that which stood in the way, or stood between God and the human race. Christ’s blood dripping on God’s Ark of the Covenant (The Ark Moses was instructed to build) was sufficient to satisfy God’s righteous demand for justice.
God’s attitude towards a believer does not fluctuate in response to action, it is not condition on a believer’s behavior. Paul is telling here at the very outset of Romans chapter 5, that being justified results in an unchanging attitude of peace with God for every believer.
The avenue of our faith in Christ’s faithful performance on our behalf, rather than peace based upon our performance, results in an unchanging attitude of peace with God for every believer. We now have available for the enjoyment of our everyday experience an everlasting peaceful relationship with God!
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