Romans 5:6-8

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church iconCoram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

1 view

0 comments

00:00
in verse 6, "...for while we were still sinners, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
00:07
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.
00:16
But God shows his love for us, and that while we were still sinners,
00:24
Christ died for us." The first part of verse 6 says, "...for
00:34
while we were still weak." The weakness that Paul is referring to is that of a moral and spiritual weakness that we have in our natural state.
00:50
In this state, we do not have the spiritual strength to overcome the natural fleshly desire for sin, and therefore are opposed to the things of God.
01:02
The subject of our fallenness is unfortunately still in debate 2 ,000 years later.
01:11
There are generally two camps. Those that understand biblically that man is completely fallen and can do nothing to affect his own salvation.
01:30
Those that believe what the Bible says and subscribe to the doctrines of grace, i .e.,
01:40
Calvinists. The second camp is those that believe that we are not completely fallen, that God does 99 % of the work, and we have to affect the last 1 % in cooperation with God and choose him over the world.
02:08
These are those that do not wholly subscribe to the doctrines of grace. In modern times, they are known as Arminians.
02:19
This is also referred to as semi -Pelagianism. What we say is that while these folks that are in error, we just need to find some good teachers.
02:42
All right, make a joke. I am of the same mind about this as R .C.
02:52
Sproul is. To quote him, he says, the overwhelming report in America today among professing evangelicals is that God offers the gospel to everybody, and that those who exercise their will to receive
03:09
Jesus, to make a decision for Christ, are the ones who are saved.
03:15
Although God does 99%, the 1 % that decides our fate for eternity rests in our cooperating and choosing
03:25
Jesus freely. The minute I am persuaded of that will be the minute that I climb down from my pulpit, because I will have no hope whatsoever that the work of evangelism would be successful or that preaching would bring any fruit.
03:51
It would be like a preacher preaching the resurrection with great eloquence, power, and rhetoric or rhetorical skills in the middle of a cemetery, calling the corpses to come to life.
04:12
Unfortunately, there is still yet a third camp. There are those that believe that man is not fallen at all.
04:27
Now off the bat, if there is no fallenness, there's no need for a Savior. This is called
04:35
Pelagianism, the idea that we affect all of our salvation.
04:45
It was declared heresy in the third century. There's not much more to say about it. The text is too full of references of the depravity of man and the elect to be ignored.
05:02
Here are two verses, just a moment. Psalm 3 verse 8, salvation belongs to the
05:12
Lord, your blessing be on your people. I will simply quote
05:19
Spurgeon on this, because he said it better than I could. The final verse contains the sum of substances of Calvinistic doctrine.
05:29
Search Scripture through, and you must, if you read it with a candid mind, be persuaded that the doctrine of salvation by grace alone is the great doctrine of the
05:39
Word of God. Salvation belongs to the Lord. This is a point concerning which we are daily fighting.
05:48
Our opponents say salvation belongs to the free will of man, if not to man's merit, yet at least to man's will.
05:59
But we hold and teach that salvation is from first to last, in every iota of it, belonging to the
06:08
Most High God. It is God who chooses His people, He who calls them by His grace,
06:14
He quickens them by His Spirit, and He keeps them by His power. It is not of man, neither by man, not of them, or I'm sorry, not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy.
06:32
May we all learn this truth experimentally, for our own proud flesh and blood will never permit us to learn it any other way.
06:46
Also in John chapter 6 verse 44, Jesus says,
06:55
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
07:05
I will raise and I will raise him on the last day. So let's focus on the first part here.
07:16
Number one, who said it? Christ said it. End of story.
07:23
Not much more needs to be said. Christ is God the
07:28
Son, and God cannot lie. Two, this is an exclusive statement.
07:37
He uses the word can't, which signifies ability, not permission. I'm sure everyone had that talk at some point with a teacher or a parent about the difference between can and may.
07:49
Christ is talking about the inability of man to go to him unless the Father calls them first. Two things dealt with there.
07:58
Total depravity and election. Now that we understand the text, and that is settled, move back to Romans while we were still weak or while we still lacked any spiritual strength to affect our salvation at the right time.
08:29
Let's address the reference at the right time. On one hand,
08:37
Paul is referencing the right time in our lives. The lives of each individual elect from the foundations of the earth.
08:48
When we were dead in our trespasses and sins, the Father called us. The Spirit moved within us and made us realize the truth of the gospel.
09:01
Our justification came to us while we were but corpses, unable to move or do anything.
09:10
As it says in Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 6, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the
09:28
Spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
09:49
But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
10:02
By grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
10:15
God had foreordained from the foundations of the earth the precise moment of our justification, and not only that, everything that led up to it.
10:31
We have a misconstrued conception of time because we're humans.
10:41
We can't really look at it the way it is. We can only imagine the way that it works.
10:47
So the most popular way to imagine time is linearly. It's a line. But that discounts everyone's line, does it not?
11:06
Every human being who has ever existed throughout time has a line.
11:14
It becomes more lines with their offspring, and so on and so forth. All of that is controlled, planned within God's sovereign will.
11:38
He took us, the elect, who were slaves of iniquity, and made us slaves to Christ.
11:47
In that moment, we were given faith. Second, let us not glance over God's work through history, which
12:00
I was just referencing. God foreordained when
12:06
Christ would be born. In Isaiah 7, 14, it says,
12:13
Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name
12:21
Immanuel. Matthew 2, 6, and John 7, 42 reference
12:30
Micah chapter 5, verse 2. But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the rulers of Judah.
12:42
For out of you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.
12:51
Matthew chapter 2, verse 18 references Jeremiah 31, 15, which says,
12:59
A voice was heard from Ramah, or in Ramah, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
13:07
Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are no more.
13:14
This is in reference to the mass killing of children in Bethlehem that Herod committed, trying to get rid of the newborn king, who was not newborn at the time.
13:30
It took him a while to figure out. Out of Egypt I called my son.
13:39
Matthew chapter 2, verse 15, in reference to Hosea, verse 11, or chapter 11, verse 1.
13:52
Isaiah 53, verses 7 through 9.
14:01
He was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent.
14:18
So he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
14:26
And as for this generation who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people, and they made his grave with the wicked, with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth.
14:53
Also, Psalm 22, which was just read, verses 16 and 18.
15:02
For dogs encompass me, company of evildoers encircles me. They have pierced my hands and feet.
15:11
I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me.
15:18
They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.
15:25
That's not the only reference. There are more than 300 Old Testament prophecies, conservatively 300, that were fulfilled by Christ in his birth, life, death, and resurrection.
15:43
And he fulfilled all of them completely. We can also see
15:50
God's divine plan work out through the history of the Gentile nations.
15:59
Take, for instance, the Roman Peace or the Pax Romana. This is a time in which
16:07
Rome is in control of most of the world at the time, certainly
16:16
Europe in the Middle East, Northern Africa. But this is the first time in history in which an environment is conducive for the gospel message to go everywhere.
16:37
Paul could not have shared the gospel with the Emperor of Rome were it not to take place at that specific point in time.
16:51
God ensured through the power of his sovereign will that the gospel would reach as far as he wanted it to.
17:03
It would reach all the nations. This is why it says in Galatians 4, verses 4 through 7,
17:12
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
17:27
And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his
17:32
Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son.
17:42
And if a son, then an heir for God. Paul calls the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the fullness of time.
17:58
Everything in Scripture points to this time. The Old Testament points forward.
18:07
The New Testament points backward. It is the event in all of space and time.
18:25
Who Jesus is and what he did are the only things in all the vastness of the universe that truly matter.
18:44
Everything else is a pale image, or as it says in Ecclesiastes, hevel, which means wispy smoke blowing away in the wind.
19:05
To quote Steve Lawson, you will never understand history unless you see it from a
19:10
Christian worldview. You will never understand how God is the
19:15
Lord of history, and that history is headed somewhere, and that there is a purpose and reason for everything in history, and that history is
19:27
His story. Until you see it from God's perspective, you are in the dark.
19:42
Moving back to verse 6, Christ died for the ungodly. God didn't wait for us to become obedient or to reach a certain level of self -control.
19:53
He didn't die for the righteous. There are none, but he died for us while we were enemies.
20:05
To die for one's enemy is something that most of us could not even fathom doing.
20:11
While the comparison may fall short, its relevancy you may understand the image of a
20:23
Philistine dying for an Israelite. I want to go through just a few verses here about the vastness of the separation.
20:41
Romans 1, if you remember it, it's been a while. Verses 28 through 32 say,
20:51
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
21:01
They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.
21:07
They were full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. Their gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
21:26
Though they know God's righteous decree and those who practice such things. Though they know
21:33
God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die. They not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.
21:44
As I said before, sound familiar? First Corinthians chapter 6 verses 9 through 11.
21:54
For do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice sodomy, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
22:19
And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the
22:30
Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Psalm 51 5 says,
22:39
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
22:49
Ecclesiastes 7 20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
23:00
Romans 3 23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
23:08
If there's any argument in anyone's mind that you were okay, I hope it's gone.
23:22
You are either an enemy of God, or you're justified.
23:36
And even those who are justified are justified, yet sinners. The standard to which we are compared is
23:45
God, and His standard is Himself.
23:54
Perfection in every way. God gives us the mirror, thankfully, of the moral law to look at, and not only can we see that we are not perfect, but when we look at the
24:09
Scriptures, we see that God made a perfect creation to begin with, the end of every day, and God saw that it was good.
24:18
It means perfect. And who ruined that?
24:31
The sin of Adam stained everything in creation. Everything. The fact of the matter is that we are so far from the greatness of God, even in perfection.
24:48
How far are we now? Verse 7 says,
24:57
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.
25:05
But God shows His love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
25:14
The urge to continue living is so incredibly strong in people that we have an automatic response that is referred to, fight or flight.
25:29
Even most animals in the animal kingdom have this response. And beyond that, our human nature is to be out for ourselves, even in the doing good for others.
25:43
It is because it's selfish. You would be very hard -pressed to convince someone to stand in the place of another who is condemned to death.
25:59
Paul says that one would hardly do it for a righteous person or one who is unjustly condemned.
26:09
Pity them, yes. Stand in their place? Doubt it.
26:19
But maybe for a good person one might do it.
26:26
A good person being one who is righteous, so unjustly condemned, and someone who is outwardly a doer of good things in their communities.
26:38
Someone who is well -liked. Perhaps someone may stand in their place, but you certainly would not be able to find someone who would stand in the place of someone who is guilty.
27:02
When Paul is using the word us here, he is referring to himself and to those he is speaking to.
27:13
The us refers to Christians, not humanity.
27:22
God the Father loves God the Son so perfectly, so wholly, that that love extends to those who belong to the
27:32
Son. In eternity it was the plan of the Godhead. They were all in agreement.
27:41
It was always the plan to save the elect from the wrath to come. The wrath being
27:50
God's wrath. That part seems to be left out a lot today.
28:00
The problem with preaching a gospel, preaching the gospel Jesus saves, you don't add from what people don't care.
28:17
God's justice must be satisfied, and it most definitely will be.
28:25
From eternity it was the plan that the Son would take upon Himself that wrath that was deserved by His people.
28:40
There is no greater expression of mercy and of love in all the history of the earth than what
28:50
Christ did on the cross for His people. It must be the preeminent thing that is taught, that is talked about, that is remembered, that is meditated on, so that by the hearing of the word that we preach, by the work of the
29:16
Holy Spirit, the elect would be saved, that the believer might be encouraged.
29:30
There seems to be a growing idea of deserveness that stems from the flesh, that you would deserve anything at all ever that is being taught passively and non -passively in the church today.
29:57
You read Scripture, as he said before, with a candid mind. You will understand that you deserve nothing.
30:06
That is why it is so incredible. We deserved nothing, and yet the
30:18
God that created the universe took it upon Himself to condescend to human form and take our punishment upon Himself for His people.
30:31
Name a king in history that did the same. Name a king, one, just one throughout history, that stepped out on a battlefield and died for his people.
30:53
If there is one, he does not compare. 1
31:01
Peter 3 18 says, For Christ also suffered once through sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the
31:19
Spirit. Colossians 1 verses 21 to 22, it says,
31:30
And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you wholly and blameless and above reproach before him.
31:54
Speaking of the church, which is the body of believers. On this
32:02
Matthew Henry said, and I will end with this,
32:08
Christ died to save us, not in our sins, but from our sins.
32:14
And we were yet sinners when he died for us.
32:22
Nay, the carnal mind is not only an enemy to God, but enmity itself.
32:29
But God designed to deliver us from sin and work a great change while the sinful state continues.
32:40
God loathes the sinner, and the sinner loathes God. And for that,
32:47
I'm sorry, and that, for such as these, Christ should die, is a mystery.
32:56
No other such an instance of love is known, so that it may well be the employment of eternity to endure, to adore and wonder at it.
33:16
Next week we will continue in verse 9, but as we finish up, please meditate on the vastness, the wondrousness, the mercy of what was done by Christ for us.