Xchange - Discussion Notes

Romans Study 3
Justification by Faith - Romans 2:2-5:11

‘Righteousness’ or ‘Justice’ is the dominant theme of Romans: the question of how God himself can be righteous, when the world he created is so unrighteous, and the people he called can be in such a powerless position! How can God’s promise to bless the whole world through Abraham, be kept? (See chapter 4) In light of a powerful empire that brings its own Gospel, establishes its own salvation, and has its own Lord, what does a peasant builder from Nazareth have to offer?

Paul has begun by showing how the world’s problems have come around as a result of severing our relationship with God. Since our relation to God and our relation to other people cannot be separated from one another – retreating from a God of holiness (i.e., a God who is ‘other’ than we are) results in retreating from people who are other than we are, and pointing the finger of judgement at them. Hence, the reason that the world is in such a mess, is that it is full of people like … (insert your own name here!)

Human sin
as ‘man turned
in on himself'

Paul now says that Jew and Gentile are alike in this respect. Although the Jews had the law (Moses; Torah; Pentateuch; first five books of the Bible), all it did was to reveal how even they had not managed to keep the law. The law had not taken root amongst the people of Israel – it revealed the character of God, but did not in itself, enable the people to embody that character. That is, it remained something ‘external’ to who they really were. It was something they could look at, aspire to, measure up to. But it was ‘out there’, and any effort to keep it was futile.

Human attempts
to ‘measure up’
to Law (or virtues,
morals, values,
principles etc etc,
yawn!)

But in Jesus Christ there comes a Gospel ‘apart from the law’. In the Gospel, it is not only sin that is revealed, but also the righteousness of God. It is not something outside us, external to us, that we have to measure up to. It is something that comes to us from outside. But it does not leave us unchanged…

God reaching into
us from beyond,
a ‘holy’ God,
enters into our world
into our lives,
into my life

Paul talks (5:3) of the sufferings of Christians, which was part of what it meant to share in the sufferings of Christ himself. But the suffering of Christ led to resurrection, his own vindication, and the righteousness of God being revealed. That is the hope that is true also of the followers of Christ. But this is not a hope that we have to measure up to, that is external to who we really are – this is a hope that does not disappoint (like the law) because “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given to us” (5:5). In Christ, God has entered into who we are to make us right/eous.

If the problem with the world is ‘me’, then God’s way of putting the world right is to put me right. So when God reaches into us, he changes us with the effect that the world itself changes. (The meaning of ‘peace’ for instance, is not static, or related to status – it is an active way of being). This means that if he is putting the world right – i.e., revealing his righteousness - and this cannot be done without changing the root of our being. Today’s section concludes with the idea of reconciliation with God – the implication being that God’s people become agents of reconciliation in the world, which is where the letter is leading us.

God enters
so as to reconcile us
to him, and to others, and
to bring integration
to a world of disintegration

Discussion Questions:

1. For the Jews, the ‘law’ was an external set of objectives. The modern world says that we measure our lives by such external objectives. We talk of morals, or principles, or values (sometimes we even baptise these pagan concepts with the prefix ‘Christian’) as though they were all that matters. What is the origin of the standards that we ‘naturally’ measure up to? Are we willing to allow those standards to be reshaped by the Holy Spirit, or do they have such a hold on us, that we cannot imagine the Holy Spirit disagreeing with us! (See last week’s study notes!)

2. Peace (5:1), or ‘shalom’, with God is a fruit of the work of Christ. But what does peace mean in your own life? Originially, it did not mean a state of doing nothing, and resting content. It meant that everything was working properly. (Like the feeling you get when the AA have just fixed your car, or the computer genius has just fixed your lap top!) If peace were to be a fruit in your life, how might you encounter it?

3. What does justified, or ‘being made righteous’ mean for us today?

4. How does the death of Jesus reconcile us to God? Does Paul say anywhere up to this point, anything about why Jesus died? If all you had to go on was this letter and the words you have read up to this point, why might you think that Jesus died? In what ways might your answer be different from what you have thought before?

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