“How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. And not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The first step in wrapping our hearts and minds around the Gospel is accepting our need for salvation. That’s why Paul spends what we know of as the first two and a half chapters of the letter here making the case for the just condemnation of all people regardless of any distinctions (for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God). Because sin and judgment are without distinction, so is salvation. The salvation in Christ is for all those who put their faith in Him as Lord (for we are all Abraham’s children). But what does it mean that we are saved in Christ? Paul tells us some pretty incredible benefits here. Let’s marvel at this together.

Let’s just walk through these one by one. The first benefit Paul highlights here is the fact that in Christ we are saved from the wrath of God. Admittedly, God’s wrath is not a terribly popular concept when people think about Him. It’s much more pleasant to think about His love and grace and compassion. And yet the Scriptures as a whole make abundantly clear that God has wrath over sin. They make it clear that wrath is a feature of God’s character we cannot avoid. Let me add to that the rather bold assertion that this is a very good thing.

Wait, what? Why? How could God’s wrath be a good thing? Because it helps to highlight His goodness. There are certain things that make you angry. Yes, some of them are merely the result of selfishness, but not all of them. There are things that make you angry, and they should make you angry. When you hear about children being abused, I suspect it makes your blood boil just like it does mine. When you hear about economically disadvantaged people being exploited by a system that is designed to make their lives difficult while coddling the wealthy, you want to protest loudly. When you hear about politicians gaming the system because of their access to information the rest of us don’t have, you want to burn down the whole system.

It’s not only okay for you to feel that way about those situations and others like them, it is a good thing that you do. It is a mark of good, strong moral character that evil, unjust things make you angry…that they fill you with wrath. They do God too.

The understandable mistake we often make, though, is that we see God’s anger and wrath over sin through the lens of our own. The truth is that while there are some things that make us angry which should make us angry, there are a whole bunch more that make us angry for totally selfish reasons. We are angry because they inconvenience us, not because they contribute an intolerable injustice to a world we know should be better than it currently is. Also, our anger isn’t necessarily always properly measured to a particular situation. When we get angry, we can lash out and swing past justice to vengeance. We wind up contributing our own injustice to the world in our attempt to rid the world of someone else’s injustice.

We see God’s wrath over sin through that lens, assume His is roughly the same as ours – that is, as broken and capricious as ours – and recognize correctly that such wrath is not a good thing. The catch here is that while we get angry about sin and injustice like God does, our anger is not like His. His is not like ours. Ours gets filtered through a lens of our own sin and brokenness. His does not. God’s anger is always perfectly measured to the situation. His anger is never selfish. He never flies off the handle with rage. He always stops at perfect justice and never goes even a nanometer beyond that. His anger is always motivated by love. God is perfect in His wrath just as He is perfect in everything else He does. It is precisely because He is so good that He has wrath over sin. And we should be glad for this. A God who didn’t get angry about sin wouldn’t be a good God at all.

Apart from Christ, though, because we are covered in sin of our own making, this wrath is rightly directed at us. We are contributing directly to the brokenness of His world. We are hurting people He loves so much that He was willing to die for them. And He doesn’t like that. At all.

In Christ, though, we are saved from God’s righteous and just wrath. When we put ourselves in Christ by faith, He receives us into Himself and covers us with His own perfect righteousness. When we accept that His work on the cross paid the price for our sins, that we are justified by His blood, we are made totally clean of all our sin and thus exempt from God’s wrath. In Christ we receive only God’s goodness and love.

In v. 10, Paul says the same thing but in a slightly different way. “For if, while we were enemies…” There’s that word again, this time in its original place. Apart from Christ, we are enemies of God. That’s hard to hear. It’s hard to hear because we generally don’t feel like we are God’s enemies. Besides, God is…God. He shouldn’t have any enemies. Shouldn’t He be above that sort of thing? Well, this doesn’t mean we necessarily have any ill will toward Him, but what other word would you use for someone who is working determinedly to thwart and oppose His plans for His world? Someone who is striving to establish their own kingdom that directly rivals His own? Someone who has thoroughly rejected His fundamental identity and who daily proclaims in word, but especially in deed, that He is someone other than He actually is? I can’t think of a much better word for that kind of a person than “enemy.”

It was while we were in that state, living as God’s enemies, that “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” If that’s the case, how much truer is it that we will “be saved by his life”? Friends, it is much, much truer. If God pulled out all the stops to reconcile us to Himself when we were His enemies, then now that we are reconciled, He’s going to do much, much more for us. It’s hard to even imagine blessings that will be off the table. When someone has shown beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt that they love you when you are at your worst, then they’ll love you even more when you are at your best. In Christ, we can be at our best. And God will love us all the more.

It is because of all of this that we also “boast [or rejoice] in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.” Have you noticed all the passive language Paul is using? There’s a reason for this, and it’s not bad writing. The reason is that God is the driving force behind all of this. We don’t have to do anything to receive it, to be made right with Him. He’s done it all already. We rejected Him and rebelled against His rightful authority and sovereignty. In response, He did all the necessary work to pave our way back to Him so that our relationship with Him can be reconciled and made fully right once again. All we have to do is to receive it by faith and then live accordingly. Then we can indeed rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us commit together to doing just that.