12. “Easter 2024 – A Life More Powerful than Death” (Romans 5, Part 1)

Part 1: Our Failure

This morning, I want to talk about a gift—about God’s amazing gift to us. But to get there, I first need to talk about our failure.

Jennifer and I lived in Sydney, Australia for four years, where I was being trained for being a pastor. Our last year there for me is marked by two very powerful memories.

In July of that year, something beautiful happened. Our first son, Timothy, was born to us. It’s an amazing thing to become a parent. To realize that you are holding in your arms a little person who somehow came into existence because of you. To feel him grabbing tight to your pinky, to watch him as he sleeps noticing his little breaths and feeling just how fragile and yet how extraordinary this little person is. We were people who had witnessed a miracle—a life coming into being.

And then, in September, something horrible happened. It was close to 11PM: Jennifer and I were watching TV as she was giving Tim his last feed before putting him to bed, and our show was interrupted by a newscaster speaking in solemn tones and taking us to live footage of smoke rising from a New York city skyscraper. From that moment on we watched, transfixed, as we saw the events of 9/11 transpire. With horror we saw one of the trade center towers collapse, and then the other. And, probably like any of you who saw it live, we thought of the people—the people who had started that day just going to work, who had left their families that morning fully expecting to return, but now their lives were over. Death had ripped people from this world, and those deaths weren’t because evil people had chosen to end those lives senselessly. 

And I remember in that moment feeling a terrible dissonance. Here I was with a baby in my arms, a sign of the extraordinary beauty and life of this world, while watching unimaginable evil. Something deep within me cried out: this is now how it’s meant to be.

Do you know the feeling I’m talking about? Everyday we experience indicators of how things could be: the beauty of a sunrise, the joy of laughter, the warmth of an embrace. There are things in this world that are deeply good. And yet everyday we also experience evidence that there is something wrong. We see it in the news filled with fear and anger; we experience it in our own disappointments; we feel it in our very bodies, as aches and sickness remind us of our mortality. It’s this strange combination of beauty and wrongness that makes us say: this isn’t how it was meant to be. Do you know what I mean? 

Now some people would say I’m just imagining this. That the things I am saying are miraculously beautiful are nothing of the sort, and likewise, the things we shudder at as evil are not really evil. There’s no “meant to be.” Things just are. Our evolutionary biology is wired by chance to feel pleasure at life or sunset and to feel bad about death, but in reality, it’s just natural. It’s survival of the fittest, where the powerful always take advantage of the weak. Death is just a natural part of the circle of life. We just need to learn to accept this.  

But I don’t buy that. Do you? I think there’s something deep within us that knows that love is truly good, and that cries out that death is an enemy. We know that there is a contradiction in this world that is a sign that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. 

And our passage tells us this instinct is right. The apostle Paul writes, “Sin, and then later death, came into the world.” Sin and death entered into this world. In other words there was a time when it was not like this. There was a time when there wasn’t this confusion, when we could trust the world to being filled with good and no sorrow. When human love was real but cruelty wasn’t even imagined. When life was everywhere, but human death did not exist.

The Bible tells us that when we look at the world today, we see not how this world was made but what we have made it into. Because we changed it: sin and death came into the world, it says, “through one man.” Specifically, through one man’s betrayal. The word that’s used in verse 15, “trespass,” has the idea of breaking faith, of betraying. At the center of the once good world was a perfectly joyful and harmonious relationship between God and us, but then in the person of Adam, who was our representative, we broke faith with God. We chose to betray God, to turn away from him and reject him as God. And ever since, each of us has repeated that decision over and over again.

In our betrayal of God, sin and death entered the world, entered like a noxious weed introduced to a beautiful garden, or like a virus that quickly overpowers a once healthy individual. Once, things were good. But now, we are told in verse 17, “Death reigns” in this world. Death has the final word. Death is the event from which there is no coming back. It is irreversible. And that’s the point. Through our failure, our betrayal, we brought about a catastrophe that we cannot fix.

Imagine a man in his 50’s who has from outward appearances a really great life. A good job, a beautiful family. But what you don’t see is that he also has a really severe drinking problem. Soothing himself through alcohol is how he has learned to deal with the anxiety, the sadness, the restlessness. He thinks he has it under control, until one day medical tests come back and he discovers that his liver is failing. The doctor tells him that there’s nothing he can do to heal it—that he likely only has a month to live. One more month to spend time with his kids, his wife before he loses everything. Can you imagine the regret? It is a catastrophe with no fix. That’s our story.

Or imagine this. Imagine that you made some really bad financial choices. Maybe it was a bad investment, or maybe you allowed yourself to get defrauded, but you have been left with no savings and, even worse, you’ve lost your job, and you are filled with shame. Over the past number of months, you’ve been maxing out your credit cards; you’re months late on your rent or mortgage payment, and in fact your electricity was just turned off because you failed to pay the bill repeatedly. You don’t even know how you can cover the cost of food for tomorrow, and, meanwhile, your debt is mounting up every day; it’s far more than you can imagine ever repaying. Every waking moment is filled with fears of what will happen to you and your family, all because of your failure. You have no fix for it. That’s our story.

One more illustration. Let’s imagine we’re living in ancient times, in the era of kings and queens. You were an official in the king’s court, but you made a terrible decision. You joined with others in a conspiracy to overthrow the king and to take over; your intent was to betray him, to kill him, so that you could gain power. But it completely failed—the king put a stop to it. And now you are in prison, sentenced to a certain death by hanging for treason. You have just days to live, and you know there’s nothing you can do. Because what you did was terrible. There’s no excuse, no mitigating circumstances. You deserve death. And you cannot make it better. That’s our story.

This is what Paul is getting at when he says that in this world “death reigns.” Our betrayal of God has placed us in an irreversibly bad situation. Which means that whenever we feel that sense of wrongness in this world that I was talking about, that sense of how this is not how this world is meant to be, what we are sensing is our own failure. We’re experiencing the fact that we have terribly broken this world in a way that we cannot fix.

Part 2: God’s Gift

Now wait, you might be thinking, why am I saying this? Isn’t an Easter sermon supposed to be, well, not super depressing?

Well, stay with me. You see, for us to understand the joy of Easter we must first honestly name our problem. And that’s the point of that first and rather dark paragraph in our passage: to prepare us for what is really Paul’s main point. If we look at the world, we see our failure, yes. But, if we look at the cross, we see a gift from God that is far greater. 

Beginning in verse 15, Paul begins speaking about what Jesus did on for us on the cross. And the word Paul uses to speak of what Jesus did is “gift.”

That’s how it begins: “The free gift.” Humanity betrays God, plunging this world into corruption and death, and what does God do in response? Not what we’d expect. He gives us a gift. And not just any gift. He gives us his Son, and his Son gives his life for us. How should we understand Jesus’ death on the cross? As an extraordinary gift to us. 

Which might seem like a strange thing to say. Crucifixion is one of the most inhumane ways ever devised to kill a person. The goal was not just execution; it’s utter humiliation. For this reason, many have misunderstood the events of Good Friday as a failure. Jesus tried to proclaim a radical message about God and love, but society wasn’t ready and so they degraded and destroyed him. 

Yes it was terrible thing that people did; but it was not something that caught Jesus by surprise, and it was not a failure. Jesus willingly chose to walk to the cross. He laid down his life for us in this way out of love, as a gift.  

This was Jesus’ plan from the very start of his ministry, which began in the wilderness. Three years earlier, Jesus joined with hundreds of others far away from the Jerusalem, at the banks of the river Jordan who were there to hear a fiery preacher named John speak about God’s kingdom coming and the need to change their lives in preparation. Moved by these words many would then be baptized. John would stand a little ways out in the river, and they would come out to him. They then would confess their sins: they would name how they had betrayed God, and then John would plunge them beneath the water. And that moment of being buried, as it were, by the flooding river, symbolized a kind of death—a desire to end the former way of life and in a new way to belong to God.   

And so Jesus also comes out to John to be baptized. And John is completely confused. Because he knows who Jesus is. Jesus has no sins to confess. He has nothing in his life to repent of. So why in the world is Jesus seeking to be baptized?  

The answer was that Jesus knew exactly what his life mission was. Jesus had chosen to be one of us. He had chosen to make our problems his problems. To make our sin his sin. When he confessed sins standing in that river, he was confessing our sins. And when he was plunged under the water, he was giving a sign of what he was going to do. That in his role as our representative, he would carry our sins unto the death our sins. His baptism was a sign of how at the cross, Jesus would choose to be plunged under the judgment and condemnation of God that our betrayal required so that we in turn would be spared.  

This was what Jesus had chosen to do for us from the very beginning of his ministry. This is the gift of God, the gift of Jesus that he gives to his betrayers. To take on himself the consequence of our failure, the death we deserve, so that we would be spared.  

Now that’s remarkable. But actually, if we stopped there, we would miss the point of our passage. Because, so far, that’s what I might call pretty great news. It’s pretty great news that God cancels our debt. It’s pretty great news that God removes all the things we did that stand in the way of us having a relationship with him, forgiving them. It’s pretty great that God spares us from the death we deserve.  

But the Christian message is more than this, it’s better than pretty great news. It is unimaginably fantastic news. 

Notice what verse 15 says about the gift: it doesn’t say that this free gift of God is a match for our betrayal, that it’s enough to cancel out the effect of it. No, it says the free gift is NOT like the trespass; it’s not equal and opposite to it. No, what are the words Paul uses in comparison? Later in that verse: “much more.” Again in 17, “much more.” The gift of God is much more than the failure. Or again, another thing Paul says in verse 15 and then again in 17 is that this gift “abounds,” a word which has the idea of overflowing. The point is that God’s gift doesn’t just meet our need. The free gift is not like the betrayal. It far exceeds it.

Let’s go back to Jesus’ baptism. If you know the story, you’ll know that Jesus choosing to be baptized was not the only remarkable thing about that moment. After Jesus plunged under the symbolic waters of death as our representative, when he came up out of those waters, something extraordinary, otherworldly happened. It says in the gospels that heaven was opened, as if the veil that hides us from the transcendent realities was for a time removed. The Spirit of God came upon Jesus like a dove. And God spoke saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” 

Just as Jesus coming under the waters was a sign of his death, so this was a sign from his heavenly Father of what would follow Jesus’ death. It was pointing forward to what would take place on Easter morning. When God reached down from heaven into the tomb where Jesus lay and filled the broken and dead body of Jesus with the power of his Holy Spirit, raising it to overflowing life. When God, by raising Jesus up, never to die again would declaring to all the world, “This is my Son that I love. I am pleased with him!”

Now let me tell you the truly extraordinary part of this. What happened in symbolic form as Jesus came out of the water, and what happened truly at Jesus’ resurrection: these things were not just being done for Jesus. They were being done for us. Because, again, Jesus was our representative, one of us. When God resurrected our representative, when he poured out his Spirit upon our representative, in this act he was giving his resurrection life and Spirit to us as well. And when God declared of our representative, “This is my Son whom I love and I am pleased with him,” he also was saying that about us, any who have received the gift of Jesus. 

Because the gift, you see, is not like the betrayal. God didn’t just wipe out our failure. He did much more.

Imagine if the man whose alcoholism sentenced to death, imagine his doctor a couple of weeks later informing him of an experimental procedure that is barely understood but might help. He agrees to try it. He goes under, not knowing if it will be the last moment he sees this world. But then the next day, he awakes. And the first thing he sees is his wife looking at him with joyful tears in her eyes, and he realizes he’s okay. In fact, he’s more than okay. He can see his wife perfectly, without the glasses he’s worn for decades. He feels filled with energy. And he is told that, remarkably, the procedure he underwent didn’t just heal his liver. It filled him with health and removed some of the effects of aging so that now it’s as if he is again in his 20’s. The gift was much more than the failure. That’s our story.

Or, returning to the illustration of you being buried by overwhelming debt, imagine if one morning, two things happen. First, you get an email from an address you don’t recognize that simply says, “I know what you’re going through, and I’ve decided to help.” And then, second, you get an alert on your phone from your banking app telling you that 50 million dollars has been successfully transferred to your account. 50 million dollars! And you realize that suddenly you’re not just able to pay off all your debts. You will never need to worry about money again. The gift was much more than the failure. That’s our story.

Or, finally, returning to the story of betrayal. On the day when you expect to be executed, the king comes to your cell and enters in. The mere sight of him fills you with grief and shame as you realize how wrong what you did was. You fall at his feet in grief. But to your astonishment, he comes down to your level, gently takes you by the hand, brings you to your feet, and embraces you. He says to you that he has forgiven you. More than that, he has decided to adopt you as his son. You will always be loved by him. You’re now royalty; the whole kingdom is yours under him. The gift is much more.

Each of these illustrations defies the imagination, perhaps especially the last one—why would a king choose to do that? Except it is this last image that is closest to the truth of what Paul means when he says “the free gift is not like the trespass.”

We betrayed God in our sin. We have dug for ourselves a pit we can never get out of, a debt we can never pay. All of this world bears witness that death reigns because of our failure. 

But God sees us, and he loves us, and he gives us the gift of himself. And this gift is more than forgiving our debt, wiping our slate clean. This gift is overwhelming generosity, limitless love. He fills us with life, so that we will never need to fear death again. He makes us his children, his sons and daughters that he loves, that he is pleased with. The gift is much more than our failure.

There are two beautiful words near the end of our passage in verse 21 that summarize all of this. In our failure, the world is broken, death reigned. But now, because of God’s gift, there is a new reality. “Grace reigns.” Grace, that abounding, overflowing generosity and kindness of God has the final word. Which means that everything good and beautiful that we see and long for more of—that will be the reality that wins in the end. Because of God’s extraordinary gift that comes to us through Good Friday and Easter, grace reigns.

God has given you and me an extraordinary gift. What can we possibly do to respond rightly? There’s really only one thing. To receive this gift. As verse 17 says, this new reality belongs to all those who “receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s what it means to be a Christian. To receive this gift of Jesus and let him lead you into this new reality of grace.

And the first step in doing this, and the step we come back to again and again, is asking God. Acknowledging your need and by asking for God’s help. And so, let’s do that now.