From Enemies to Allies

The image in the epistle reading this morning is of mankind at war with its creator. We are at enmity with God, in open rebellion. Simply put, we are His enemy. Earlier in the epistle we read about the state of both the gentiles and the jews. The gentiles despite having some knowledge of God through creation were given over to the fulfillment of their lusts and desires that they might see the futility of such a life. The Jewish people were given the law, and even at times claimed to want to live according to it, but they likewise failed to follow the law. In Romans 3, Saint Paul quotes from the psalms to show the state of the world: “There is none righteous, no, not one;  There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.”

This is the world that the Lord Jesus Christ enters into. We are His enemies, but He is not our enemy. He takes on our humanity, stepping onto the battlefield that we have made by our enmity with Him, but He has come to make peace. When Saint Paul speaks of us having been justified by faith, he is not saying that we are pronounced “not guilty” because we believe certain things, He is saying that if we choose to be faithful to Jesus Christ we are changing sides in this battle. We declare peace with Christ who has declared that He is at peace with us. From this, Saint Paul says we also have access to the grace that is God’s offering of Himself to us. 

Salvation, then, is not just about us being saved from the consequences of our sin. Those consequences are the means by which we recognize our need for repentance, and by which we come to desire to turn from sin to God. Consequences, whether temporal or eternal are a gift from God, not simply a penalty or a punishment. And so, even when we are justified we still have tribulations.

Salvation is also not just a matter of becoming moral or ethical. It is good to pray, fast, and to show mercy to others. It is good for us to read the scriptures and to come to church. Of course it is right that we avoid evil and seek to do good, but we are called to do these as Christians.

In the Baptismal service we refer to the person being baptized as a “sealed newly-chosen warrior of Christ our God.” This isn’t simply imagery meant to invoke the need to struggle in the Christian life. The reality is far deeper than that. In Ezekiel 37 we read about Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. The Lord calls on him to prophesy to the bones that they might live, and so the bones come together joint to joint, and the Lord lays sinews and muscles and skin on those bones and then fills them with the breath of the Spirit, and they become an exceedingly great army. Immediately after this, Ezekiel is given a vision of the grafting back in of the gentiles so that all of mankind can be joined to Christ the Resurrection and the Life in His holy body, the Church. This is the kind of warrior we are meant to be. We are dead and corrupt men who have been raised to life, refashioned, and given the Holy Spirit. 

We are not called to try to avoid sin, we are called to be dead to it. We are not to be moved by sin and temptation just like a corpse is not moved by such things. Likewise, we are not called to do good things on our own, rather we are called to be alive in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and to be animated in the doing of good things by God Himself, so that whenever we do good works we can give glory to God for the things that He Himself has worked through us. 

Salvation is not a matter of working alongside Christ, but of His life continually lived out in us. Saint Paul continues, “And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” If Christ lives in us, we glory in tribulations, not because we enjoy it when bad things happen to us, but because our Lord was glorified when He was lifted up on the cross. To encounter suffering is to have the opportunity for Christ to work in and through us as only Christ can. 

This produces perseverance. Suffering with Christ imparts His grace to us. It makes us more like Him. It gives us something eternal in this present life, something that endures into the Kingdom. How can we not persevere to our crowns when we are already beginning to experience a foretaste of the Kingdom to come.

And this perseverance produces character. We become formed and confirmed in the likeness of Christ. What begins as individual actions becomes character, the consistent form and shape of what kind of persons we are in Christ. That character is not as easily moved by the whims, appetites, and temptations that assail us, and it more readily runs to the doing of good works because it is formed by the presence and grace of God in our lives. 

And of this character comes hope which doesn’t disappoint. The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Blessed Augustine asks: “Who can hurt such a man? Who can subdue him? In prosperity he makes moral progress, and in adversity he learns to know the progress he has made. When he has an abundance of mutable goods he does not put his trust in them, and when they are taken away he gets to know whether or not they have taken him captive.” Everything that happens to a person with the character of Christ is for his benefit and so he learns to trust in God and to have hope.

It is surely possible that a Christian can turn away from God, that he can reject the things that have been given to him, but it also becomes possible for a man having received grace upon grace to remain dead to the world and alive to Christ, Saint John Chrysostom says, “if God reconciled us to himself when we were in open warfare with him, it is surely reasonable that we should be able to remain in a state of reconciliation.” 

Mankind through the tempting of the devil has been in open rebellion with God, but in His love for mankind, God has drawn near to us. If we will ally ourselves with Him, if we die to ourselves and are raised with Him, then He will fight in us, for us, and through us as we face the enemy of mankind. Saint Paul tells us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” We can be given victory over these powers. But we will win the battles by the grace of God, by His self-offering to us.

The epistle that we read this morning began with the words “Brethren, having been justified by faith.” This justification comes not because we believe the right things. The things that we think or feel in our hearts are important, but faith is about what we do. If we live faithfully as Christians, God becomes our master, our shepherd, our Lord and we choose to die to ourselves daily and to remain dead to the sins that had mastery over us. Everyday we expect tribulations as we strive to remain faithful, but we expect that by these trials and difficulties God will continue to refashion us into His likeness and we shall be saved by His life.