Monday
Monday
Divine Demonstration in the Cross
He did this to demonstrate his justice…. But God demonstrates his own love for us.
Romans 3:25; 5:8
All human beings of every race and rank, the immoral and the moralizing, Jews and Gentiles, are without exception sinful, guilty, inexcusable, and speechless before God. That was the terrible human predicament we considered yesterday. There was no ray of light, no flicker of hope, no prospect of rescue. “But now,” Paul suddenly breaks in, God himself has intervened. After the long dark night a new day has dawned. It is a fresh revelation, and it focuses on Christ and his cross. Romans 3:21–26 is a tightly packed paragraph, which Charles Cranfield has called the “centre and heart” of this part of the letter, while Leon Morris goes further and writes that this paragraph may be “possibly the most important single paragraph ever written.” For here great terms like propitiation or atonement, redemption, and justification occur.
But I will concentrate on what Paul writes about the demonstration of God’s justice and love. The apostle draws a deliberate contrast between the past and the present, between sins committed previously (which God in his forbearance left unpunished) and the present in which God has acted to demonstrate his justice. It is a contrast between the divine forbearance that postponed the punishment and the divine justice that exacted it in Christ and his cross.
According to Romans 5:8, however, there was another demonstration on the cross: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Here demonstrate is really too weak a word; prove would be better. To grasp this, we need to remember that the essence of loving is giving and that the degree of love is measured partly by the costliness of the gift to the giver and partly by the worthiness or unworthiness of the recipient. By these standards, God’s love in Christ is absolutely unique. For in sending his Son to die for sinners, he was giving everything, his very self, and giving himself for those who deserved nothing from him except judgment.
We cannot understand the cross unless we have seen it as a double demonstration—of God’s justice and God’s love.
For further reading: Romans 5:1–11