We Shall Be Saved Through Christ
Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when 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 5:9,10
Paul wanted his readers in Rome to remember that God has both proven His love for us in the death of His Son and poured His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Objectively in history and subjectively in experience, God has given us good grounds for believing in His love. There is a coming together of the historical ministry of God’s Son (on the cross) and the contemporary ministry of the Spirit (in our hearts).
We are looking at the six assertions Paul makes in the beginning of Romans 5:
(1) we have peace with God (5:1)
(2) we stand in grace (5:2)
(3) we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God (5:2)
(4) we rejoice in our sufferings (5:3)
(5) we shall be saved through Christ (5:9,10)
(6) we rejoice in God (5:11)
We now come to:
(5) we shall be saved through Christ (5:9,10)
Paul has so far concentrated on what God has already done for us through Christ. We have been justified. We have peace with God. We are standing in grace. We rejoice in our hope and in our sufferings. But there is more to come. Salvation has a future tense as well as a present and past. We have been saved from the guilt of our sins and from God’s judgement on them but we have not yet been delivered from indwelling sin or been given new bodies in the new world.
Paul describes our future salvation in two ways. ‘Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!’ (5:9). In the future we will be saved ‘from God’s wrath.’ We have already experienced this in part. On the cross Jesus bore the full wrath of God in our place making it possible for us to have peace with Him and stand in His grace. But at the end of time as we know it there will come ‘the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgement will be revealed’ (2:5) and His wrath will be poured out on those who have rejected Christ (Ephesians 5:6; Colossians 3:6). We have been saved from that future wrath (1 Thessalonians 1:10; 5:9). The believer ‘will not be condemned; he has [already] crossed over from death to life’ (John 5:24).
Paul now describes our future salvation another way, ‘we [shall] be saved through his life!’ (5:10). Jesus not only died for our sins and was raised from the dead to life, but He means His people to experience for themselves the power of His resurrection. We can share His life now and will share His resurrection on the last day. Paul will enlarge on these truths in Romans 8.
In our present “half-saved” condition we eagerly look forward to our full and final salvation. Paul explains how we can be sure of this in two ‘how much more’ statements. ‘Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, when 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!’ (5:9,10). God has done the hard thing so He’ll surely do the easier thing. We have been both ‘justified’ and ‘reconciled’. These are the hard things both achieved through the cross. ‘We have now been justified by his blood’ (5:9) so the Judge of all the earth has pronounced us righteous; ‘we were reconciled to him [to God] through the death of his Son’ (5:10) so the Judge has welcomed us home.
God has done the harder thing so we can trust Him to do the lesser thing. If God has accomplished our justification at the cost of His own Son’s blood, how much more will He save His justified people from His future wrath?
If He reconciled us to Himself when we were His enemies, how much more will we experience the fullness of our salvation in Christ now that we are His friends?