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Commentaries and Other Bible Study Helps - Prayer Tents - Prayer Tents
5:1-8:39 Hope as a Result of Righteousness by Faith. The central theme of chs. 5-8 is that believers in Christ, who are righteous in God's sight, have a certain hope of future glory and life eternal.
5:1-11 Assurance of Hope. Those who are justified by faith have an unshakable hope, knowing they will be saved from God's wrath on the day of judgment by virtue of Christ's substitutionary death on their behalf.
5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified. Chapter 5 begins with a ringing affirmation of the objective legal standing of the Christian--that the Christian, through faith in Christ, has been justified and declared righteous by God, once for all. The result of this is that the Christian no longer lives under the fear of judgment and the wrath of God but has peace with God, which is not merely a subjective feeling but an objective reality. See also note on John 14:27.
5:2 The grace in which we stand refers to the secure position of the believer's standing (as a blessing of justification), and the hope of the glory of God refers to the promise that Christians will be glorified and perfected at the last day--a hope that results in joy.
5:3-4 The people of God rejoice not only in future glory but in present trials and sufferings, not because trials are pleasant but because they produce a step-by-step transformation that makes believers more like Christ.
5:5 Followers of Christ have no reason to fear humiliation on the judgment day, for they now belong to God. Indeed, they know that they have received God's love because the Holy Spirit poured his love into their hearts at conversion.
5:6 In this and the following verses, Paul grounds the subjective experience of God's love (v. 5) in the objective work of Christ on the cross. Weak here denotes lack of moral strength and is parallel to ungodly.
5:7-8 On rare occasions, even a human being will die for a righteous (morally upright) person or for a good person (one who has done much good). God's love, however, belongs in an entirely different category from human love, for Christ did not die for righteous people or those who have done good for others but for sinners, that is, for ungodly, unrighteous people living in willful rebellion against God. It is not just Christ's love that was shown in his death but also God the Father's love. While God's righteousness and justice led to his plan of salvation through the death of Christ (see 3:25-26), it was his love that motivated this plan.
5:9 Christians are now justified (declared to be in the right before God) by virtue of Christ's blood, that is, his blood poured out in his death on the cross. Therefore, they can be sure that they will be saved on the day of judgment from God's wrath.
5:10 As in v. 9, Paul argues from the greater to the lesser, though here he speaks in terms of reconciliation (the language of friendship) rather than justification (a legal term). Since Christians are now reconciled to God through Christ's death, they can be assured that they will be saved on the day to come (here "saved," Gk. sōzō, includes not only justification at the start of the Christian life but also completed sanctification, glorification, freedom from final condemnation, and future rewards). But here the salvation is based on his life. The reference is to Christ's resurrection, showing that both the death and resurrection of Christ are necessary for salvation (see 4:25). Chapter 6 will develop the theme of union with Christ in his resurrection life.
