Good Friday Reconciled! Salvation! Revolution!

Good Friday

Reconciled! Salvation! Revolution!

By: Prof. N.T. Wright

---

The result is this: since we have been declared ‘in the right’ on the basis of faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus the Messiah. Through him we have been allowed to approach, by faith, into this grace in which we stand; and we celebrate the hope of the glory of God.

That’s not all. We also celebrate in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces patience, patience produces a well-formed character, and a character like that produces hope. Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us.

Romans 5:1-5, KNT

---

Romans Chapters 5 to 8 is one of the most extraordinary set pieces that Paul ever wrote. It is very carefully designed in sections, mostly of around 11 verses each, mostly finishing with the statement about what God has done through Jesus, or in the Messiah. Paul has structured it very carefully. I have to think that Paul, after years and years of teaching this stuff, and of engaging in debates, knew exactly where he was going with it. He has lined it up very carefully.

And we can see that in the way it begins and ends, because Romans 5:1-11, at the beginning of the section, corresponds in all sorts of ways to Romans 8:31-39, the glorious climax. Both of them are about the death of Jesus, revealing the love of God, giving his people utter security. The confidence that comes from that bubbles up through the whole passage.

But in between, Paul does what so many New Testament writers do and tells one more time the story of the Exodus. As we saw in Romans Chapter 3, we just get a little flicker of that through the redemption that is in the messiah Jesus. If we know our stuff, we know that redemption is the Exodus word, but it is here where we see how that actually works out in practice.

But let's just stop on 5:1-5 for a moment, because this is where he says we have ‘received access now to this grace in which we stand’. This is new temple language, new covenant language. This is about God and his people coming together at last. This is the watchmen and Isaiah lifting up their voices and shouting for joy because, in plain sight, they have seen Yahweh returning to Zion.

This is about the hope of the glory of God. And therefore, as throughout Paul, we celebrate. He says, ‘We celebrate in our sufferings because suffering produces patience, produces character, producers hope, which doesn't disappoint, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us’. And, thus, we see where we are going.

This is a Trinitarian theology: the death of Jesus, the love of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, the present suffering, the future hope. It's all here, and it all comes to its climax in Romans Chapter 8. And then in Romans 5:6 to 11, Paul takes the themes of Romans 3:24 to 26 and unpacks them a bit further.

But we shouldn't, therefore, see Romans 5:6 to 11 as something other than Romans Chapter 3, rather, we see it is its expansion. So what does he say? While we were still weak at that very moment, the Messiah died on behalf of the ungodly. Verse 8: ‘This is how God demonstrates his own love for us. The Messiah died for us while we were yet sinners’. You see what Paul is saying about who Jesus is. If I say to you, 'I love you so much, I'm going to send somebody else to die for you', that's not an expression of love.

For Paul's argument to work, it demands that the Messiah is himself the living and dying presence of Israel's God. Paul doesn't give us a great theory of Christology as to how that would work. He simply says it quite boldly. This is how much God loves us: that the Messiah died for us while we were still sinners. So then in verse 9 he says, ‘Since we've been declared to be in the right by his blood, we will be saved by him from God's coming anger, God's wrath’.

See the wrath of God in Paul isn't something here, which was poured out on Jesus on the cross. Rather he says now that the cross has done its work. We have been justified by his blood, so that when we look ahead to the time when God will call in accounts and judge the whole world, we know that then we will be all right. He explains that more at the beginning of Romans Chapter 8.

When we were enemies, he says, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son. If that is so, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. We say to Paul, okay, what happened by 6:00 P.M. on Good Friday? Reconciled! What's the result of that? Salvation! That's how it works. The revolution, which began on Good Friday, will be completed at the last day, not when we are taken away to heaven, but when we are saved from sin and death and from all the corruption that goes with that.

In other words, we share in the salvation which consists of God instituting new creation, new heavens and new earth, with us being raised from the dead. Paul says, 'Therefore we celebrate in God, through our Lord Jesus, through whom we have received this reconciliation' (Rom 5:11). All this enables Paul to stand back and see the end from the beginning.

Here is the point: because he died for sins, the power of the powers has been broken. This is about victory. There is no condemnation for those who are in the Messiah. And then, ultimately, it is not just a juridical thing about sin; it is also a cultic thing about worship. Paul says, ‘I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor any of these things will be able to separate us from the love of God in king, Jesus, our Lord’.

That is to say, the new temple has been constructed, and by the Holy Spirit, we are that temple. We have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. It isn't only the problem of sin that's been dealt with. It is the problem of ideology because in Jesus and in the spirit, the new temple has been constructed. We who are renewed in the image of God ought to be the angled mirrors, reflecting the praises of creation, to God at least, and reflecting the love and wisdom and holiness of God back into his creation.

This is our vocation: to be people of worship, to be people of mission, to be people renewed according to the image of the creator, having been renewed in knowledge; to be people who can think through these things. The result is that whether we are preachers or teachers or whether we are prayers or workers or evangelists, we will know, deep down, that this is a love story.

But this is also the creation story. This is the story of the God who, from the beginning, intended to make his beautiful world and make humans as his image bearers to share his work in that world; and because humans have totally messed it up, the God who came himself as a human, as the true Israelite in the person of the Son, to do for the rest of us what we couldn't do for ourselves, so that in and through him we might be rescued from the results of our idolatry and sin and be enabled to worship and to live for his praise and glory. That's what it means to be the royal priesthood, and that is the result of the revolution that happened on the first Good Friday.