Romans5chapter 5

Romans 5:1-2

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the therefore drawing together everything argued from 3:21 onward into a settled fact rather than a felt experience alone. Access by faith into this grace wherein we stand names a permanent standing rather than a momentary visit, the verb translated stand carrying the sense of an achieved and abiding position. Present peace and present grace open onto a future certainty, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God, so that the chapter’s movement from verse 1 to verse 11 runs from peace already secured to glory not yet seen.

Romans 5:3-5

Paul adds a second, harder ground of rejoicing: we glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, patience experience, and experience hope. The chain names a process rather than a formula, suffering producing a tested character that in turn produces a confident expectation, and hope maketh not ashamed because it does not rest on the sufferer’s own resolve. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us, the gift of the Spirit named here as the reason hope holds, God’s own love poured out rather than merely asserted.

Romans 5:6-8

For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly, the timing and the object both underlined: not when we had reformed, but while we still had no strength to reform, and not for the deserving but for the ungodly. Scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die, Paul granting that human love can rise that high for the admirable, then setting God’s love against it: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The comparison is the whole argument, a love that does not wait for merit before it acts.

Romans 5:9-11

Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him: the argument moves from the harder thing already accomplished, justification while enemies, to the easier thing yet to come, final deliverance from wrath, an argument from the greater to the lesser Paul will repeat three more times before the chapter ends. If when enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life, the reconciliation already won guaranteeing a salvation still future. Paul names a third ground of joy in verse 11, joying in God himself through the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the atonement, katallage, the same reconciliation named in verse 10, has now been received.

Romans 5:12

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: Paul opens the Adam and Christ comparison he will run for the rest of the chapter, one man’s act determining the condition of the race that descends from him. The sentence is famously left unfinished, the so as by one man clause never receiving its matching so also by the one man Christ until verse 18, Paul interrupting himself to establish first, in verses 13 and 14, that sin and death reigned even before the law existed to name sin as transgression. The human race’s solidarity in Adam is the premise the whole passage needs before it can state the parallel solidarity in Christ.

Romans 5:13-14

For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law, and yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression by breaking a direct command as he did. Death’s reign across those centuries without a written law to transgress is Paul’s evidence that death flows from Adam’s one act rather than from each person’s own law breaking, since there was no law yet to break in the same way. Adam, Paul adds, is the figure of him that was to come, the first named type in Scripture stated as a type by an apostle’s own pen, one man standing for and determining the fate of all who are in him, a pattern Christ fulfills in the opposite direction.

Romans 5:15

But not as the offence, so also is the free gift: the parallel between Adam and Christ is not an equation, and Paul corrects any reader tempted to flatten it. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many, the much more marking the first of the passage’s five arguments from the lesser to the greater. Grace does not merely match Adam’s ruin measure for measure; it exceeds it, because the God who gives is greater than the man who fell.

Romans 5:16

And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift, Paul drawing a second contrast alongside the first: the judgment was by one offence unto condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification. One sin brought the verdict of condemnation on the race, while the gift answers not one sin but the whole accumulated weight of many, a disproportion in grace’s favor matching the disproportion Paul has just named in verse 15. The asymmetry is the point each time Paul repeats it.

Romans 5:17

For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one, much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ, the third much more shifting the image from death’s reign over its subjects to the believer’s own reign in life, no longer merely reigned over but reigning. The abundance Paul names, grace and the gift of righteousness both given without measure, is what turns subjects of death into co-reigners in the age to come. Christ’s one act does more than cancel Adam’s; it installs those who receive it in the very dominion Adam lost.

Romans 5:18-19

Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life, the sentence Paul left hanging back in verse 12 now finally completed. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous, Paul restating the same parallel in terms of standing rather than verdict, sinners made so by Adam’s disobedience and righteous made so by Christ’s obedience. The two alls and the two manys are read by the same rule throughout the passage, each naming the whole company united to its respective head.

Romans 5:20-21

Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound: the law’s arrival did not create sin but exposed and multiplied its guilt by naming transgression precisely, turning bare sin into conscious lawbreaking. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, the fifth and final much more of the chapter, grace never merely keeping pace with sin’s increase but always outrunning it. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord: the chapter closes with two reigns set against each other, sin’s reign ending in death and grace’s reign issuing in life everlasting, and the second is stated as the stronger of the two.