Saturday 20 April 2019

What a Friend...!

If, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Romans 5:10

If you want to grasp, in a nutshell, the basic meaning of the Easter weekend, I don’t think you could do better than soak your mind in this short verse.

The key word is “reconciliation” - “becoming friends with someone who used to be an enemy”.

It’s a beautiful word because, when it happens, it can lead to tears of happiness. You think, for example, of fighter pilots who flew for Britain and Germany during the Second World War. Each was aiming to destroy the other, to blow them out of the sky: they were “enemies”. But then you see them on television today, old men shaking hands, sharing a drink, and reminiscing about those sad, dark days.

Or it could be something as simple as falling out with a friend, quite likely over something petty. But after apologies have been exchanged (isn’t “Sorry” a wonderful little word!) you are friends again. (Is it time some of us said “Sorry” to somebody?)

Paul tells us that there was a time when we were “God’s enemies” because of our sins. (Note, by the way, that he doesn’t say that God was our enemy; he has only ever loved us, in spite of all our sins.)

But now we have been “reconciled to him”. And the means by which that has happened is “through the death of his Son” - which takes us, of course, straight to Good Friday. Jesus died on the cross to deal with our sins and make us friends of God.

This raises a very obvious question for each of us: have I been reconciled to God? Can I say that I am a friend of God? Or am I still in a state of enmity, still under “God’s wrath”, as Paul puts it in verse 9? If I am, it’s time I said sorry to God and, by simple faith in Jesus, took what he did on the cross as applying to me.

Is this a word for somebody reading this today? Please don’t put it off!

Paul doesn’t leave it there, though. He goes on to say that if indeed we have been reconciled to God, “how much more... shall we be saved through his life!”

Though he doesn’t explicitly mention the resurrection, Paul is obviously talking about the risen life which Jesus entered into on that wonderful first Easter morning. (I love that “how much more”, don’t you? - as if to say, “If God has already done the first bit, the “reconciliation” bit, we don’t need to doubt the “saving” bit!)

So that’s Easter in a nutshell: We are reconciled to God by Jesus’ death; and we are saved by God through his resurrection.

You might ask, What’s the difference between being “reconciled” and being “saved”? To which the answer is, to all intents and purposes, not a lot! After all, if you are reconciled to God you must surely be saved. And if you are saved, how can you not be reconciled? It’s two different aspects of the same thing.

But if you wanted to drive a wedge between these two words, you could put it something like this...

Reconciliation gives us a new status. We often say, and quite rightly, that we are children of God (and that’s some status!). But it’s also true to say that we are friends of God. We are in a happy and harmonious relationship with him, exactly as he originally intended every man and woman to be (think Adam and Eve in Eden before sin came in).

Salvation, on the other hand, gives us a new state. It makes us different people, because we have been raised with Jesus into the new, pure and holy life of the resurrection. The old life of sin and failure is behind us, and we are “born again” into new life.

That doesn’t mean that we are perfect immediately. No, a whole lifetime of wrestling with our weaknesses lies before us. This is why Paul uses the future tense when he talks about our salvation: “how much more... shall we be saved through his life.”

So it seems that we can say both “I am saved” and also “I will be saved”.

Put it like this... In one sense we are already saved, through the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus and our trust in him; in another sense we are in the process of being saved, as we seek to walk with God day by day; and in yet another sense we will be saved, when at last we enter God’s final and perfect kingdom. It’s that third sense Paul has in mind here.
So, back to where we started... Can you, this Easter-time, read Romans 5:10 and say “Yes! That applies to me!”
I do hope so!

Lord Jesus, thank you for dying for me to make me a friend of God. Help me now to live for you, as someone truly saved. Amen!

No comments:

Post a Comment