Romans 5:1 to 5 · Passage · Hope
Hope That Does Not Disappoint
The five verses open the fifth chapter of Paul's letter to the church at Rome and follow his account of Abraham's faith.
Paul writes that believers now have peace with God, and nine verses later he says they were once enemies of God.
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.
- The passage
- Romans 5:1 to 5
- Book
- Romans
- Hold in memory
- Romans 5:3 to 4
Summary
Romans 5:1 to 5 sets out what justification through faith gives a believer now and what it promises. Its subject is hope, the settled expectation of what God has promised. Paul places suffering inside the life of hope as one of the means God uses to build it, so a believer can rejoice while he suffers.
- Those justified through faith have peace with God and access by faith into the grace in which they stand (Romans 5:1 to 2).
- The hope of the passage is the hope of the glory of God, the glory that all who have sinned fall short of (Romans 3:23).
- Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3 to 4).
- Hope does not disappoint because God has poured out His love into believers' hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).
Peace with God and Access to Grace
The first two verses name three gifts of justification: peace, access and the hope of glory.
Hope is the value Scripture sets beside faith and love, and in Romans 5:1 to 5 Paul ties it to suffering. He shows where hope comes from and why it holds when life is hard. Scripture names despair as its opposite, and these verses show why a suffering believer need not reach it.
The question the passage answers matters to anyone who has suffered: how can a believer rejoice in hardship without pretending it is easy? Paul answers from what God has already done for the believer through Jesus Christ.
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,Paul draws the first gift from the justification he has just taught: peace with God through Christ.
The Greek opens with the participle dikaiothentes, having been justified, which names a past act whose result stands.
through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.The second verse adds access into grace and names the hope of the glory of God as the believer's boast.
The word for access, prosagoge, stands only three times in the New Testament, here and in Ephesians 2:18 and 3:12. The verb the Berean text renders "we rejoice" is kauchaomai, which the STEP Bible lexicon defines as to boast. Paul uses it again in verse 3 of rejoicing in sufferings and in verse 11 of rejoicing in God.
The Chain from Suffering to Hope
Paul names the four links with four Greek nouns, and each noun carries a sense the English word only partly shows.
Paul's chain runs from suffering to hope, and its last station is the love of God already given.
- The Berean words
- we also rejoice in our sufferings
- The Greek word
- thlipsis, pressure
- The Berean words
- suffering produces perseverance
- The Greek word
- hupomone, endurance
- The Berean words
- perseverance, character
- The Greek word
- dokime, the proof of a test
4Hope
- The Berean words
- and character, hope
- The Greek word
- elpis, expectation
- The Berean words
- God has poured out His love into our hearts
- The Greek word
- ekkechutai, has been poured out
A chain of five stations from Romans 5:3 to 5, the four links Paul names and the love of verse 5, each with its Berean words and Greek word.
Thlipsis, the word for suffering, means pressure, and the STEP Bible lexicon counts 44 uses. Hupomone means endurance that holds on, and its entry adds "cheerful (or hopeful) endurance". Dokime, the word for character, means a test and what a test proves, and it stands only seven times.
Albert Barnes explained dokime as testing "as when we test a metal by fire, or in any other way, to ascertain that it is genuine" (Notes on the New Testament, on Romans 5:4). Endurance under suffering shows the believer that his faith is real, and that proof feeds hope.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you encounter trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Allow perseverance to finish its work, so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.James gives the same order from trial to perseverance to maturity, so the chain was taught in more than one letter of the early church.
Why Hope Does Not Disappoint
Verse 5 gives the reason hope holds: God's love already poured out by the Holy Spirit.
The verb translated "does not disappoint" is kataischuno, glossed in the STEP Bible lexicon as to shame down or disgrace. A hope that failed would leave the one who held it ashamed before others, and Paul says this hope will not.
Paul uses the same verb twice more in Romans, each time quoting Scripture, as in "Anyone who believes in Him will never be put to shame" (Romans 10:11).
They cried out to You and were set free; they trusted in You and were not disappointed.David recalls that the fathers trusted God and were not disappointed, the assurance Paul now gives of hope.
The reason Paul gives is in the past. The verb ekkechutai is a perfect tense, glossed "has been poured out", so the love was given once and remains.
But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.Three verses later Paul shows where God proved this love, in the death of Christ for sinners.
The Hope of the Glory of God
The hope of verse 2 answers the glory lost in Romans 3, and Romans 8 says what that glory will be.
The object of the hope is the glory of God, a glory Paul had already spoken of in Romans 3.
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,Paul names the glory of God as what all people fall short of, which is the glory the justified now hope for.
Between the two verses stands Paul's teaching that righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe (Romans 3:21 to 22). Romans 4 ends with Jesus "raised to life for our justification" (Romans 4:25).
Paul returns to the glory of God in Romans 8.
I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.Paul weighs present sufferings against the coming glory and judges they cannot compare, which is why suffering can stand inside hope.
How Teachers Have Read the Passage
Clement of Alexandria, John Wesley and Albert Barnes read the chain and the hope at its end.
died 215 · Clement of Alexandria
Clement of Alexandria quotes the whole chain in The Stromata, book 4, and explains where it leads: "For the patience is on account of the hope in the future".
1703 to 1791 · John Wesley
John Wesley read the love of verse 5 in two directions at once (Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament). He called it "The divine conviction of God's love to us, and that love to God which is both the earnest and the beginning of heaven".
1798 to 1870 · Albert Barnes
Albert Barnes held that verse 3 should read "we rejoice" as verse 2 does, and he read it as joy carried "even into the midst of trials" (Notes on the New Testament, on Romans 5:3).
How Certain Is Hope?
Two readings of hope stand side by side, one stressing its certainty and the other that its good is still future.
Hope is a certain expectation, as sure as its groundMatthew Henry; Albert Barnes
Matthew Henry wrote in his Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Romans 5:2, that "grace is glory begun, the earnest and assurance of glory". Barnes wrote on verse 5 that "what we hope for we shall certainly obtain" (Notes on the New Testament).
The objection: Romans 8:24 to 25 keeps hope on what is not yet seen, so hope still waits for what it does not hold.
Hope is of a good still future and hard to obtain, and it leans on God's helpAugustine of Hippo; Thomas Aquinas
Augustine wrote that "hope has for its object only what is good, only what is future, and only what affects the man who entertains the hope" (Enchiridion, chapter 8, translated by J. F. Shaw, 1887). Thomas Aquinas wrote that "the object of hope is a future good, difficult but possible to obtain", and that hope "attains God Himself, on Whose help it leans" (Summa Theologiae, II-II question 17, article 1).
The objection: Hebrews 6:18 to 19 calls the hope an anchor for the soul, firm and secure, because God bound His promise with an oath.
Hope That Holds in Hardship
Later in the same letter Paul gave the church at Rome a command that joins hope and affliction.
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, persistent in prayer.The three commands of the verse put the chain of suffering to hope into practice.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible word index (TAGNT), the tagged Greek New Testament with Strong's numbers, morphology and glosses (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- STEP Bible Greek lexicon (TBESG, Tyndale House, Cambridge), based on Abbott-Smith (1922), CC BY 4.0, entries g4318, g2744, g2347, g5281, g1382, g1680, g2617 and g1632.
- Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, book 4.
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Romans 5:2.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on Romans 5:5.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the New Testament (1832 to 1869), on Romans 5:3, 5:4 and 5:5.
- Augustine of Hippo, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, chapter 8, translated by J. F. Shaw, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 3 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1887)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II question 17, article 1, English Dominican translation, second edition (1920)
Keep Studying
Studies1
In this value6