Day 7 — The Starting Point: Who Jesus Is, and What He Has Done
Today’s Passage: Romans 5:6-11
About twenty-five years after the crucifixion, a man named Paul wrote a long letter to a group of people in Rome he had never met. He wanted them to have the whole argument in order before he arrived. The letter runs sixteen chapters. Six sentences of it are in front of you.
By this point Paul has spent four chapters on one unflattering claim, that nobody arrives at God with clean hands, and that the religious and the irreligious are in the same position on that score. Having said what is wrong, he now says what God did about it. When he writes “us” and “we” in these verses, he means himself and the people he is writing to, and he keeps himself inside every unflattering word.
Read it slowly. Paul says one thing three times in three different words, and the repetition is not accidental.
As you read, hold this: Christ died for the ungodly: not after they had improved, but while they were still powerless, still sinners, still enemies.
Context What dying for someone meant in Rome
In the world these readers lived in, dying for another person was admired, but it ran along fixed lines. A soldier might die for his commander, or a man for the patron who had fed his family for years. Roman writers told those stories the way people now tell stories about someone running into a burning building: rare, magnificent, and always for someone who had earned it. Favours flowed toward people worth the investment. Nobody praised a man for dying on behalf of his enemy. That was not nobility, that was waste. Paul knows exactly where his readers set the ceiling of human love, and in verse 7 he says it back to them before saying something that does not fit on their scale at all.
Romans 5:6 (BSB)
⁶ For at just the right time, while we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.
“Powerless” is not a complaint about willpower. It describes a position. A man who has gone through the ice cannot pull himself out by deciding to want it more. Paul has been arguing for four chapters that this is the human situation in front of God: not people slightly behind who need to catch up, but people who cannot fix from the inside the thing that is wrong.
And “the ungodly” is a hard word, so it is worth being clear about who it covers. Not a subgroup, not the obviously bad, not the people outside the building. In Paul’s argument it covers everyone he is writing to, the most respectable person in the room included, and the man holding the pen.
“At just the right time” is about God’s calendar, not about anyone finally deserving it. The death came at the moment God chose. It did not come at the moment people were ready, because if it had waited for that, it would be waiting still.
Romans 5:7-8 (BSB)
⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Verse 7 is Paul doing arithmetic on ordinary human decency, and doing it fairly. A righteous man is correct, upright, the sort you would trust with your money and never warm to. Almost nobody dies for him. A good man is generous, the sort people are fond of, and for him someone might possibly work himself up to it. That is the ceiling of ordinary love, and it is genuinely admirable when someone reaches it.
Then verse 8 walks off the scale in the opposite direction. Not a better class of person, but the worst: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The word Paul uses for what God does with His love is proves. God is not announcing a feeling. He is producing evidence, and pointing at one event in public history. If you want to know what God thinks of people who have no claim on Him, the answer is not a statement. It is a death.
And the timing again. Not “once we were sorry,” and not once a person had made himself presentable. Still sinners. The love did not arrive because something attractive appeared. It made its own reason.
Romans 5:9-10 (BSB)
⁹ Therefore, since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from wrath through Him! ¹⁰ For if, when we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life!
“Justified by His blood” is the sentence to slow down over, because it is the claim under everything else, and it can be said without church vocabulary. Justified is a courtroom word. It means declared to be in the right, the case closed in your favour, not on probation and not on a payment plan. By His blood names what makes that verdict possible: the death of Jesus. Not regret. Not effort. Not religion of any kind.
That is worth hearing clearly even by someone who thinks it is false. Christianity is not the claim that God grades on effort and forgives the ones who try hardest. It is the claim that the debt was settled by somebody else’s death, and that this is the only ground on which any person stands with God.
“Saved from wrath” is the sober part, and it is better said plainly than loudly. God’s opposition to evil is not a mood He gets into. A God who shrugged at cruelty would not be good. Paul says there is something to be saved from, and says in the same breath that the death that declares a person right is what carries them through it.
Then verse 10 puts down the third and hardest word: enemies. Not distant, not confused, not slow learners. Paul’s argument runs from the greater to the lesser. If God did the costly thing while people were hostile to Him, then finishing what He started with people He has already brought near is not the part in doubt. And He is not finishing it from a grave. “Saved through His life” means the one who died is alive, and it is that living Jesus who keeps them.
Word study "reconciled" — katallassō (Romans 5:10)
Greek: καταλλάσσω (katallassō), pronounced kah-tahl-LAH-so. Strong’s G2644. Outside the Bible this was an everyday money word: to exchange one currency for another, to swap a thing for what it is worth. Used of people, it meant a relationship changed into its opposite, hostility handed over and peace taken in its place. So “reconciled” is not God deciding to overlook it or let it go. It is an exchange, the old standing traded for a new one, and in this sentence God is the one doing the trading while the other party is still at war with Him.
Romans 5:11 (BSB)
¹¹ Not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
The end of it is not relief, which is what you would expect. It is gladness, and the gladness is in God Himself. Not mainly in being let off, but in the person on the other side of the settled account. A debt cancelled leaves you free of a creditor. This leaves you with a Father.
The last thing Paul says about it is the shape of the whole day: reconciliation is received. It is handed over, not achieved. Nobody in these six verses talks God round, or makes peace, or brings anything to the table. The peace was made, at a cost, by the one who was wronged, and it is held out.
Study notes Who moved first
"And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins." 1 John 4:10 (BSB)
Written by a different man, decades later, and it lands in the same place. The direction of the movement is the point. Every version of this that begins with us reaching up gets it backwards.
Today’s Decision
Read verses 6, 8 and 10 once more, out loud if you can, and listen for the word all three share: still. Powerless. Sinners. Enemies. Each one describes the people the death was for, at the time it happened.
Then, if you want to, say to God in your own words what you read today and what you make of it, up to and including that you do not know whether He is there. You do not have to agree with the passage to say that. It does not have to be tidy, and there are no right words for it.