Romans 5:3-5 - Expectation (Conciliation Series, Part II)

 Part IV: God’s Conciliation, Confirmed

Yet not only so, but we may be glorying also in afflictions, having perceived that affliction produces endurance, yet endurance testedness, yet testedness expectation.

Hmmm. Knowing that ‘boasting’ is ‘glorying,’ here, we are being told to… boast… in our afflictions? Like, our… struggles? Hold on, what? Give me just a second…

…Yyyyyyup, I just reread the entire evangel, really quickly, and this seems to be the case here. It’s not the only time this idea will be conveyed, either (ex. 2 Cor. 11:30, 12:5.) This may seem a bit confusing, I guess, like “how did this idea come about? We started with ‘boasting in expectation’ to ‘boasting in struggles!’ How did this happen?” The answer is in the words, “Yet not only so.” Yeah, people like to skip that part, considering it to be connective tissue. The words ‘yet not only so’ are in response to the Jewish objector, who asks something along the lines of, “Yeah, but… you still go through stuff, right? Wouldn’t a loving God be solving this issue? Wouldn’t He stop putting you personally through struggles? Wouldn’t your afflictions be resolved?”

Paul’s answer: “Not only glorying in expectation, but glory also in afflictions!” Yes, the struggle is the opposite of the grace of God. By definition – it’s a fucking struggle. It sucks. To the world, the Stoic is, arguably, the best kind of endurer, as they take everything, essentially without complaint. Yet in grace, we are told that we don’t merely need to endure the struggle, but rejoice in it! How’s that for a radical message?

Yet here, we are going to be taken from point A to point B on the subject of affliction – of struggle, that leads to a positive shift. Every affliction you have in your life can be understood in this way. Yes, I do mean ‘every,’ if you really let yourself think about it, keeping the grace of God in mind. The affliction itself is special for the believer. Observe a sneak peek at Philippians 1:29:

To you it is graciously granted, for Christ's sake, not only to be believing on Him, but to be suffering for His sake also.

There’s a special kind of affliction that we endure, separate from the afflictions of the world. Not only do we suffer regular bullshit, like most, but we have the added bonus of recognizing truth in a world that simply doesn’t recognize it. On top of this, the jurisdiction of darkness (that is, the world) we live in today is run by Satan, who is great at keeping us right down there in the depths of the struggle. It’s an added layer to the world, having perceived by Christ’s faith the true nature of the metaphysical – that He is saving, not condemning, in this world.

But let’s elaborate. Affliction leads to endurance. This is natural – it’s about as far as the Stoic gets. This endurance is not the world’s endurance. The world feels fit to endure to prove something about themselves, yet this ‘endurance test’ that they concoct is proven futile in nature, seeking a crown on this earth, when this earth is all but facing a revealed indignation, and is rotting to its core because of sin. Their endurance test, to ‘prove’ they can handle whatever comes their way, is a test not of the spiritual, but of the physical. How many times, when you ask someone ‘how they’ve made it so far,’ do they smile and go, ‘Oop, it’s all about that money!’ Admittedly, I don’t know how it is in many parts of the world, but here in Baltimore, I hear that phrase daily. One of the most Catholic cities is driven by money. Go figure!

Our endurance recognizes the enemy – not the person, but the corrupting factor within them, and within ourselves, being sin. It recognizes the world – the matrix, the evil eon, however you feel fit to define it – as controlled by an evil deity. Satan has authority down here, Christ in the heavens. We are subject to Christ, in His faith. The alternative, for the unbeliever, is operating under Satan’s authority (wonder why you’re having a bad day?) This is not to call the unbeliever themselves to be satanic (though I’m sure there are a small few that recognize their satanic allotment in relation to ours and revel in it,) but that they are indeed caught in a rather frustrating trap and, due to the corrupting sin factor, are unable to perceive the truth at this juncture. Our endurance is dealing with these folk (whether they know anything or not,) knowing full well that Satan is pressing down on you. Recognizing the enemy, recognizing affliction, thus building the endurance, because, well, he’s an enemy (an enemy that is defeated, per Christ’s sacrifice.)

Such endurance produces testedness. I say this a lot: if you are enduring something, you realize, “Oh, shit! This endurance is building me up for something!” If you sign up to run a 5k, you can’t laze around and show up the day of, expecting to come in first place. You need to train. You need to practice. You need a regimen. If you deviate from this regimen, there are practical effects in the payoff, or can lead to complacency. The same follows here. If you stop being afflicted, you may grow complacent, or not recognize God’s grace in quite the same way.

See, peace from the celestial has no real weight if you’re at peace with the physical, right? It’s why so many struggle to understand Paul’s words, here. They may be having a bad day, sure, or, painfully, struggling with some major, life-changing issues. Yet there’s an acceptance of the reality written into their hearts. It’s like… like, taking the TV show’s lore too seriously, if that makes sense. Like, when a character dies in a show, you cry, right? It’s natural. You’re sad. But you usually get over it, knowing that they’re just actors. Yet if you walked up to your friends and said, “Gosh, yeah, The Red Wedding was a horrible event in our history… if only we had known, we could have prevented it!” They would look at you like you’re a special kind of stupid.

The same idea should be applied to life. If you’ve accepted your reality to be true, then you’re allowing the weight of something like death to be taken too seriously. You’re letting the events of the TV show get to you, when they don’t need to, knowing the grace of the One telling the story. So far, we’ve seen the grace enlighten us, and we don’t have any resolution for the unbeliever yet, either, other than ‘God’s conciliated Himself to us,’ but hopefully, it’s become easier to trust that grace is the true ‘message’ that life is conveying, here! If you’re feeling ‘tested,’ then recognize that, the same way your legs are, through exercise, torn down and built up in preparing for a race, so is your spirit, through affliction, being torn down and built up in preparing for something more.

What is that ‘something more?’ Good question. Observe: affliction is producing endurance. Endurance is producing testedness. Testedness is producing expectation! In being tested, Christ’s faith is made apparent in you, which itself is the channel in which grace operates. So grace is producing expectation. Aaaand, double checking verses 1 and 2, it looks as though this is the second component, the second prospect, that being justified by faith offers:

“Being, then, justified by faith,

(1) we may be having peace toward God, through our Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom we have the access also, by faith, into this grace in which we stand

(2) and we may be glorying in expectation of the glory of God.”

   Boy, isn’t that great? So this struggle in affliction reveals that, though we may see affliction as a heavy struggle, that it’s actually one of the key components in being able to boast in our expectation! It’s the element that makes you realize, consistently, that you’re being prepared for an expectation that reveals God’s glory. It’s now not just a statement from verse 2, but something that can be pointed at and recognized in experience. You can look back at every moment of your life and go, ‘oh, oh yeah, without that experience, I wouldn’t really be where I am now, would I?’ Any possibility of ‘if I did something else’ is completely thwarted by the understanding that, ‘oh, shit, but the ‘what if’ didn’t really happen! Everything did happen a specific way, and without it, I wouldn’t have learned this at all!’

*   *   *

Yes, there’s more to the above idea. The faith dwelling in us is not dead. It’s not rooted in ourselves, our bodies, which are dying. It’s rooted in One Who already died, and has been resurrected. This faith itself is such living evidence of our progressing against the current hostile world – in peace, mind you! The justification by faith itself is the miracle that we can look at and go, ‘Oh, shit, no one could have thought this up on their own!’ Paul, ex murderer, couldn’t have ‘figured this out’ one day, or come up with it on his own!

Yet he strongly writes that there’s no possibility of you or me failing. Not because we won’t make mistakes, by any means – we naturally fail pretty much every day (afflictions, incoming.) But the living faith in us not only justifies us, but then reveals that any sin, whether internal or external, is designed produce more expectation within us! The expectation is built through the trial, teaching us in emotion and physicality to recognize God and His grace, through the lens of His act of complete grace and love in the face of the sin on this corrupted world, simply because He loves all parties involved.

Now expectation is not mortifying, seeing that the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit which is being given to us.

The reason ‘expectation’ is such a crucial word to me in all of this is because we need assurance. If we aren’t assured that we’re saved, and feel like there’s a contingency, then Romans 1:18-3:20 becomes horrific by nature. The salvation becomes mere possibility, not fact. You would not be operating out of love for others through understanding, but a fear and selfishness on being correct – having to do what’s right (in God’s sight, following the entire law,) or else.

Some may argue, I guess, that ‘forgiveness’ is the same thing – that if God ‘forgives,’ you may be enticed to ‘do it right this time,’ in a proper place of subjection and fear. This is true, sure, but it doesn’t completely justify and deem you righteous before the eyes of God. See, ‘forgiveness’ is great and all, but you’d still have to be forgiven on the next transgression, and the one after that, and the one after that. Justification doesn’t ‘forgive and forget,’ but deems you righteous before God. Forgiveness may allow you to ‘fearfully serve,’ but for justification, that’s only half the picture. We serve Him out of love, having had love poured out in our hearts.

Did you like that transition? I like it, too, but I should clarify: it’s God’s love being poured out in our hearts – not just ‘some type of love that we manifest,’ but God’s love entirely. It’s of Him, for Him. It’s the motive for our deliverance, and thus the motive for our salvation. The love of God is an incredible statement alone, and one that I want to come back to later on in this series. Nonetheless, it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the evangel, if you really think about it. We don’t just have the love of God poured on us, because everyone has that (1 John 4:8.) Moreover, it is not our love that we get to be happy about! Our allotment here is greater than this – we not only have God’s love, but it is in us. It’s in our hearts. Where the law that was written in our hearts used to be, we now have God’s love as the replacement. Out with the old, in with the true.

What’s more is that, as it’s poured in our hearts, it now displays in our actions, as faith’s law (Rom. 3:28.) If it’s in you, it will reflect. Now, as someone with depression, this is a bit hard for someone like me to apprehend. I struggle to realize that it’s in me, because upon coming into a realization of the truth, I went, “Oh, uhh, am I supposed to love now or something?” For me, ‘love’ simply wasn’t defined. I didn’t really know… how to, if that makes any sense. It didn’t add up for me, and the idea that God’s love was in me, without me even knowing what love was, confused me. As long as I’ve known myself, ‘loving’ really isn’t something I’m good at. I’ve learned this from many family members, friends, and especially my own dad. It’s something I’ve been told for much of my life is not in me, and something I believed, for a long time, thanks to failed friendships.

Yet God says here that it’s in my heart. I learned, of all places (apart from Christ’s sacrifice, of course,) from a woman I fell in love with. I mean, she was everything I wanted. Everything she did, the way she walked, talked, entered a room, left a room, laughed, cried, smiled, frowned, every eccentricity, every hairstyle, every last article of clothing, every hug… all of it stood out to me and, funnily enough, I came to care about her in every way that I would care about myself. I’d wake up and want to make sure she was okay before I was. I couldn’t say that, of

course – I was a little awkward and didn’t want to make her feel weird or anything. It was (and still is) one of the most powerful feelings I’ve ever held for another. Two years we were best friends (I know, I was friend zoned.) Two years I had those feelings. I came into knowledge of the truth on the tail end of this friendship. She knew how I felt, and told me one day that she was moving away, and I realized that I’d probably never see one of my best friends ever again. I still haven’t seen her. It’s been almost 5 years, too. I miss her with everything in me, to this day.

Yet in the experience, I learned what it meant to love. To care for another as though they were myself (Rom. 12:9.) This love – this love, that I’ve described, in my experience – I realize is not my own. I didn’t come up with it. I couldn’t have found this in me. I couldn’t, not with everything I was. Yet God’s love flourishes in this flesh, and no other. This love was His, not my own, and I recognized its strength. My heart could hardly (still can hardly) take it. It’s a teaching that I needed to experience in order to fully comprehend – the expectation of our Lord is not mortifying. Meeting or knowing God in any way is not a scary endeavor, because His love is made so apparent in the heart of a believer.

He wins us, not by telling us what to do, or requiring anything of us (Acts 17:25,) but by showing His love in us. His method in doing so wraps up the verse, that He does so through the holy spirit that’s given to us. This begs the question: what is the ‘holy spirit?’ First: the wording should be clarified. God is pouring His love through the ‘holy spirit.’ This should clarify that the ‘holy spirit’ itself is not literally ‘God’ in this passage, because God is using ‘holy spirit’ to pour love in our hearts. The holy spirit is objectified, here. This should explain that ‘holy spirit’ is a form of power, not God Himself, here. It’s unclear at this juncture whether the ‘holy spirit’ would be a distinct personality from God (as the universe is created through Christ, per 1 Cor. 8:6 and Col. 1:15-17, but Christ is clearly a distinct being, per John 1:1-14,) or an explicit, powerful form of God’s power.

As the above is a very complicated subject, I want to answer it for you now, to make this study far easier. Observe Matthew 1:18-20:

“Now Jesus Christ’s birth was thus: At the espousal of His mother, Mary, to Joseph, ere their coming together, she was found pregnant by holy spirit. Now Joseph, her husband, being just and not willing to hold her up to infamy, intended covertly to dismiss her.

Now at his brooding over these things, lo! A messenger of the Lord appeared to him in a trance, saying, “Joseph, son of David, you may not be afraid to accept Miriam, your wife, for that which is being generated in her is of holy spirit.”

The passage concerning holy spirit ends here. It’s clear that the power of God generates Miriam here, but doesn’t properly convey whether or not the holy spirit is a separate entity or not. Let’s slide over to Luke 1:35 for clarity, where a messenger of the Lord heralds Jesus’ birth to Miriam:

“And answering, the messenger said to her, “Holy spirit shall be coming on you, and the power of the Most High shall be overshadowing you; wherefore also the holy One Who is being generated shall be called the Son of God.”

This should clarify for us – the holy spirit is the power of God, that He inflicts deeds on mankind through it. This power – this same power that planted Jesus in Mary’s womb – is the same exact power that pours love in our hearts. To quote George Rogers:

“The result is a knowledge of the love of God toward us to which appeal can be made as a ground of expectation. The eyes of our heart are enlightened and we find God’s love in the gospel, and poured out in, not into, our hearts, where the spirit dwells.”

That last part caught me. What is the difference between ‘in’ and ‘into’ that he stresses? Well, as it turns out, there is a difference – it is poured out of God, and in us, by holy spirit. Remember also that this is grace driven (Rom. 5:1.) I’ll wrap it up with A.E. Knoch’s commentary:

“His way of winning our response is to pour His own love into us first, as exemplified in the death of Christ for us while we were most undeserving of His favor. The grace of it lies in the entire lack of anything in us to draw out His affections toward us.”