A Kingdom of One

 July 11 2021

Romans 5:1-12

         Last week being the Fourth of July, there is, of course, much talk about our United States and just how really united we really are. There is no argument that we are divided on a number of issues but historically that is the way it has always been. The important lesson learned from history though, is that we have always sought the good of the nation over the differences between those who make up the nation.  I say all this just to point out that unity is a great idea but a very difficult challenge to make happen. Unity is also a different goal than say, uniformity where what is sought is for everyone to be little cookie cutter replicas of each other. No, unity is finding a oneness while leaving our differences in tact which is another idea all together.

         Now, if we think that coming together and seeking unity is difficult for us as people we can only imagine just what it must be like for us as people to be unified with God. Have you ever considered just what it must be like for us to be united with God? This is what we are going to explore in this the sixth week of our summer series entitled Confident. When facing all of the afflictions of our world which threaten to come against our faith, Jesus tells us to be confident because he has overcome the world. We grow in our confidence as we remember just what it is that we believe, that we revisit those beliefs and allow these times of reflection to strengthen our trust in Jesus. As we have stated previously, the Church of the Nazarene has sixteen core beliefs that all of us can be confident in. So far in our series we have learned about our belief in a Triune God, in Jesus the Son of God, perfect God and perfect man who took upon himself our sinful and corrupt flesh but was without sin. We have learned about the Holy Spirit, the God nearby, who fills us with the love of heaven, who is our communion with God and who is our Spirit of adoption who makes us cry out Abba, Father. We have learned that the story of Scripture is about our being able to do unto others as we would want done to us and how Jesus is the fulfillment of this Law. Last week, we spoke about just what it is that keeps us from living out this good we know to do because all of us know just what it is, the good, that we would want done to us. Yet, even though we know the good we know to do we find that we are unable to accomplish the good we know to do. We see this in the life of Peter in the garden of Gethsemane when asked by Jesus to pray for him in the hardest time of his life but Peter instead fell asleep and Jesus told him that his spirit was willing but his flesh was weak. Peter loved Jesus and would have done anything for him yet his devotion, his spirit was not enough to overcome the power of his sinful flesh. It is this inherent weakness within all of us, this is why all of us are people who must confess that we are people who on our own do not give honor and glory to God with the lives that God has given us. What all of us need is a Savior, someone who can come and rescue us from this body of death as Paul puts it in the seventh chapter of Romans. This Savior is Jesus, the Son of God, the one who came to us while we were yet sinners. This then is what it means to be a sinner, someone who stands in need of a Savior, and praise God, he has given us a Savior whose name is Jesus. Through the shedding of his blood, Jesus has made himself the mercy seat where we as unholy people can be cleansed so that we might be able to come into the presence of a holy God. Now, as Jesus as been merciful to us, we too must be merciful to others otherwise we will find that we remain as enemies of God when we are enemies with someone else.

         So, with all this in mind we come to our article of faith for today which goes by the name of Atonement. Here is what is found in the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene. Article Six. Atonement: We believe that Jesus Christ, by his sufferings, by the shedding of his blood, by his death on the Cross, made a full atonement for all human sin, and that this Atonement is the only ground of salvation, and that it is sufficient for every individual of Adam’s race. The Atonement is graciously efficacious for the salvation of those incapable of moral responsibility and for the children in innocency but is efficacious for the salvation of those who reach the age of responsibility only when they repent and believe.

         So, there is a lot to unpack here, to say the least. Perhaps the first thing we must figure out is just what is this word, ‘atonement’ mean? Well, the word ‘atonement’ is a relatively new word that was coined as a translation of the Greek word, ‘katallasso’. This was a Greek word that was originally used for a coin exchange. This would be very similar to those machines that you put a dollar bill into in order to receive four quarters. You exchange the dollar bill for four quarters because the machines you want to use only takes quarters. So, when Paul wanted to describe what had happened to the human race when Jesus he used this Greek word for a coin exchange because something very similar had happened, an exchange had taken place so that now instead of being sinners in need of a Savior we experience what the translators termed, ‘atonement’, we are at one with God.  So, when we are saved we are not only saved from something, our sinful state, but we are, at the same time, saved to something, this state we call atonement. We hear this in Paul’s writing in the first chapter of Colossians, where we read that the Father has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The word translated here as ‘transferred’ is a Greek word which means that a change of where one stands has occurred. This change is what we call atonement.

         Now, I’m not sure if you caught it or not but I have done something today that I have never done concerning the scripture, which is that I have used the exact scripture I used for last weeks message. I didn’t do this because I thought we needed to go over it twice so that this time it might stick; no, I used the same scripture because in Paul’s understanding sin, salvation and atonement are hard to separate. To understand sin you have to first know the one who saves us from sin in order to know just what it is we are saved from and when we figure out what we are saved from then we must go on to figure out what we are saved to. Too often we only talk about our salvation from sin as if when we receive our salvation we are then free to go about our business as long as we behave ourselves. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. You see, in our scripture for today, from the fifth chapter of Romans what Paul first writes about is our current status which has been brought about through the death of Jesus. The first five verses of the fifth chapter of Romans concerns what we know as the atonement. In the sixth verse of this fifth chapter is where we hear the word, ‘for’, which tells us that what has been described in the previous five verses has come about because of what follows, the salvation that occurred through the death of Jesus.

         So, knowing all of that just how are we to understand what we call ‘atonement’ this transformation that has happened where we find ourselves at one with God, united at last with him? Well, as we have continually stated throughout this series on our article of beliefs, the one who holds the key to our understanding is Jesus. Everything concerning our faith must find itself anchored by him for he is our anchor of our faith. So, if we want to know what is meant by being one with God we find a place in scripture where Jesus speaks about this oneness and that place is found in the tenth chapter of John, the thirtieth verse where Jesus plainly states that he and his Heavenly Father are one. When the Pharisees in his audience heard Jesus declare this they were, of course, enraged, and stated that Jesus had committed blasphemy. Jesus answers them by quoting from the eighty second psalm, where the psalmist imagines God addressing all of the so called gods that the people of the world believed in. In this Psalm, the one true living God, Jesus tells the Pharisees, is quoted as saying that he knew of these lesser gods and just what it was that made them out to be false gods. This meant that it was God, and not these Pharisees who understood what defines the true God from all the counterfeits. The true God we are told in the eighty second Psalm is the one who gives justice to the weak, and the fatherless, the one who maintains the right of the afflicted and the destitute. He is a God who rescues the weak and the needy, delivering them from the hand of the wicked. Now, how all of this ties in with the claim of Jesus that he is one with the Father is  found when Jesus tells the Pharisees, “If I am not doing the works of my Father then do not believe me; but, if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know  and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.So, from this we can begin to comprehend that when we speak of the atonement, this being unified with God, we are not merely speaking of some mystical union of God and I walking hand and hand from here to eternity but rather being one with God, God in us and we in God means that the works we do will be the work of God , the work of giving justice to the weak and the fatherless, the work of maintaining the rights of the afflicted and destitute, the work of rescuing the weak and the needy, delivering them from the hand of the wicked. It is important that we allow this definition of how our life is supposed to look to be in the fore front of our thoughts as we speak of our walk with God because if this is the way of a holy God then this more than anything is the very definition of the holy life we have been saved from death to live out. You see, for us, many times holy living for us is about what we are giving up rather than what we are taking on, whose lives we are stepping into to bring the love of God.

         Well, all this is well and good we might say but just where are ever told that we are one with God? The answer is found in what Paul writes in the beginning verses of the fifth chapter of Romans where he tells us since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is this word, ‘peace’ that Paul uses here that causes most of the trouble for us when thinking about this idea of the atonement. For us, peace means that hostilities have ceased such as a war being over but this word in the Greek goes much farther. For the Greeks, this word we know as peace meant to tie together into a whole.

So, I believe Paul uses this word to describe what has transpired because of what Jesus has accomplished. Now, because of Jesus we have been bound to God  so that we are forever united with him.This is the new reality that we are to ask God to make real to us by faith This is the change that has occurred where once we were unholy people unable to approach a holy God now through the death of Jesus we have become bound together with him.

         As wonderful as knowing that we now have peace with God is, there is more because Paul also writes that through Christ  we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. Here, Paul speaks of grace and how he describes it is very important for us. I say this because too often when we hear people speak of grace it seems as if they are talking about some mystical substance that seems to be able to be held in a bottle which God can pour out on people. This is not how Paul speaks about grace, though, because he writes that grace is a place that is stepped into, a place where we stand. So, here Paul is telling us that grace is the favor or the welcome of God where we can enter into the most of holy of places and do so without fear. Now, I thought it was also interesting that Paul would be clear to state that it is in this place that we are to stand and I wondered what was so important about mentioning this act of standing. There could be many possible answers as to why Paul insists that we are to stand however the most intriguing answer comes from understanding that before the fifth chapter of Romans Paul has just been writing about the life of Abraham. There was one incident that we are told where Abraham stood in the presence of God. The story is found in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis and it concerns God’s plans to destroy Sodom. Abraham we are told stood before God and asked God if he intended to sweep away the righteous with the wicked and then begins to intercede on behalf of the righteous that might be living in Sodom. Abraham begins and asks God to spare Sodom if fifty righteous people live there and then barters with God until at last God agrees to spare Sodom if there were but ten righteous people in Sodom. So, Abraham, the one whose faith God counted toward him as being righteous,  he is an example of one who stood before the presence of God and interceded for God to be gracious to the righteous in a wicked city. So, perhaps this grace by which we enter into the holy presence of God is supposed to lead us to be people who plead for God’s grace for others. It is this understanding that helps us to grasp what we read in the second chapter of the book of Titus, “For the grace of God  has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions…”The ungodliness written about in this passage is the same ungodliness Paul tells us, in the fifth chapter of Romans, that Jesus Christ has died to save us from. So, do you hear just how it is that God transforms people from being ungodly people who need a Savior to being people who renounce that same ungodliness and earthly desires? God transforms them by his grace, through welcoming them into his presence because it is there through his favor people can behold the glory of God. How utterly wrong we are when we see unholy behavior in others and believe that we can get them to change their ways by judging them, pointing our fingers at them and telling them how terribly wrong they are! We should, instead, when standing in the presence of God through his grace, pleading for God to be gracious to others as he has been gracious to us because it is only the grace of God that can train people to renounce their unholy behavior.

 Instead of our judgment, Paul tells us that others should see our joy. Paul tells us that those who entered into the grace of God are those who have joy in the hope of the glory of God. The reason our hope fills us with joy is that the hope found in Jesus is the only hope that anyone can be certain of. All of the many different things we place our hope in must fail so that we at last will turn to the hope that can never fail, the hope of the glory of God. Jesus in the twelfth chapter of John’s gospel told his disciples that the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Here, Jesus was speaking of his death upon the cross because what it means for Jesus to be glorified is for us to value him as he truly is, the God of self-giving love. This is what Jesus goes on to further explain to his disciples that whoever loves his life will lose it and whoever is willing to give up his life in this world will keep their life for eternity. If anyone serves me, Jesus continues, they must follow me; and where I am there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor them. Our hope then is found in the glory of God which is God’s self-giving love. Only by knowing this can we understand Paul’s reasoning that we are to rejoice in our suffering. It is in our suffering that we exercise the self-giving love, the self-giving love which is the anchor of our hope. As we endure, remain under this reality of suffering we are being tested to see if this self-giving love is our true way of life. Yet there is no worries as to whether we can persist in loving with this self-giving love because the Holy Spirit is continually pouring his love into our hearts. So, there is no shame for us if we suffer as we love with such a love because we are certain that in the end our Heavenly Father will honor us when we serve him. In the end we will enter into the joy of our Master and hear, “Well, done good and faithful servant.” This is the fullness and greatness of what it means for us to be united with God. Amen!