“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When was the last time you were at odds with someone you loved? If you are married, when was the last time you and your spouse were not on good terms with each other? That’s a miserable feeling. Even if you’re not in the wrong, living with a relational divide is no fun at all. You long for things to be right again. The longer the divide persists, you start to find yourself looking to other places to get the emotional and relational needs that were satisfied by the relationship when it was working. You just want peace again. Here, as we begin the next major part of Paul’s exploration of the Gospel, he tells us how we can have peace with God. You don’t want to miss this.

Paul says three things that are worth some attention. Let’s take each of them briefly in turn.

The first is this idea that we have been justified by faith. When someone is justified, they are pronounced right from whatever wrongs or sins they may have done. The pithy preacher’s definition is that when I am justified it’s just-as-if-I’d never sinned. That’s silly, but it makes the point. When we place our faith in Christ, we are thereupon justified for all our sins.

Okay, but how does that work? How can faith result in our being pronounced clean of any sin? Because of the object of our faith. It doesn’t have anything to do with us. When we place our faith in Jesus, what we are saying is that we accept His sacrificial death on the cross was efficacious for us. To put that another way, we are agreeing with God’s assessment that Jesus’ sacrificial death justly paid the price for our sin.

When we by faith align ourselves with the work Jesus did on our behalf on the cross, we then able to receive the rewards He earned in the resurrection. In other words, He did the work and now shares the rewards with us. Our sins are covered and we are clean. We are justified by faith.

Because of that, Paul says, we have peace with God. Because our sins have been atoned for thanks to our justification in Christ by faith, they aren’t standing in the way of our ability to have a relationship with God. We now have peace with God.

Of course, the idea that we have peace with God necessarily implies that we were previously in a state of conflict with Him. This is because apart from Christ, we are in a state of conflict with Him. As Paul puts it a little later in this same passage, we are His enemies.

Now, that feels like an awfully strong word, but what else do you call someone who is working diligently to oppose and thwart all of your plans? What do you call someone whose character is fundamentally at odds with yours? What do you call someone who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge you for who you are, instead treating you like you are of no consequence no matter much you have done and continue to do for them?

When Adam sinned, he set all of humanity on a course away from God’s rightful authority and sovereignty. we became God’s enemies, determinedly working to reduce His glory and deny His power all the while exalting our own. Of course, the fact that we didn’t have any glory or power that weren’t first His and given to us as creatures uniquely made in His image means this entire project was an exercise in delusion, but that never seemed to stop us, let alone slow us down much.

And the result of all of this was a lack of peace. We didn’t have peace with God. We were at odds with Him. The problems with this are obviously manifold, but perhaps the principle two issues are that God is the singular source of goodness and life in the universe. To put ourselves at odds with Him in favor of a delusion of our own grandeur set us on a collision course with evil and death. There’s no peace to be found there.

In forfeiting peace with God, though, we also forfeited peace with people. You can’t be rightly related to God unless you are rightly related to people, but you can’t be rightly related to people if you aren’t rightly related to God. This loss of peace was comprehensive. What’s more, we knew it. And so we kept seeking it from various sources. We sought it from every source except the one where it could actually be found. That we left alone because we understood that it meant giving up our delusions of control, and that was simply something we weren’t willing to do.

The worst part of this whole affair is that in order to satisfy God’s justice and appease God’s rightful wrath, we had to return to Him what we took in the first place, namely our lives. Yet to return those meant not having them ourselves. You can’t be at peace with someone who is dead, though, so that wasn’t an option God was willing to consider. Something else had to be done. If there was going to be peace, God was going to have to make it Himself. And so He did. In Christ.

This is the third thing. This peace we now have with God because of our justification by faith comes only through Jesus. One of the reasons Jesus came is that we couldn’t make peace with God on our own. We couldn’t resolve our differences with Him. Indeed, as Paul also notes a little later in this passage, we weren’t really meaningfully interested in trying to bridge that gap. We were perhaps interested in what God could do for us, but acknowledging Him as God wasn’t something that was on our radar. We were walking this path of evil and death and showed no real inclination of turning around and walking the other way.

So, rather than on God insisting that we come to Him, He loved us so much that He came to us in Christ. He took on human flesh, became fully a man, and entered into our experience in order to bridge the gap between the two of us on His own. He did all the work. Jesus kept the covenant. He fulfilled the righteous demands of the Law. He laid Himself down and with His arms stretched out on the cross, He made it possible for us to get from one side to the other. He made it possible for us to have peace with God. If we want that peace for ourselves, we have to go through Him. He’s the only way. There are lots of ways to get to Him, but He’s the only way to get to God. Our faith must ultimately and finally be in Him and no one or nothing else.

This is the final hard step of embracing the Gospel. But once we take it, once we accept His resurrection and status as Lord and adjust our lives accordingly, the rest is simple. It’s still not easy. In fact, Jesus Himself promised us that following Him wouldn’t be easy. We are going the opposite direction of the rest of the world. We should expect resistance. We should expect people to tell us we’re wrong. We should expect people to hate us for our efforts to live like Him. We should expect people to make what they believe to be well reasoned arguments against our faith. We should expect them to mock us and belittle us and troll us. That’s all part of the journey. But with His Spirit dwelling in us and His kingdom lying before us, we keep pressing on, enjoying the peace we have with God all the way. May you receive and live in that peace.