Commentary on Romans 5:1-8

In this text, God’s love for human beings takes center stage. Love has not appeared before in Romans, but here it explains why God has acted in Christ Jesus and his death to save sinners. Paul is blunt about the plight of human beings that prompted God’s love to be expressed in this costly way. It was while we were “still weak” (5:6), and “still sinners” (5:8, and “enemies” of God [5:9]) that Christ died for us. His death was the way in which God overcame our alienation from God. Despite being the party offended against, God undertook all that was necessary to repair the broken relationship.

God’s love for us, therefore, does not depend on what we are. It does not depend on our having positive qualities that make us lovable from God’s perspective. We are loved even in the ugliness of our sin. Martin Luther captured this perfectly when he wrote that “sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.”¹

This does not mean that the gospel leaves us unchanged. In contemporary Western culture, it is acceptable to preach that God loves us as we are, that there is nothing we can do that will make God love us less, and that God meets us where we are, even if at a deeper level people do not fully understand the huge challenge of living in a way that embodies these truths. It is less acceptable to say that God also loves us too much to leave us as we are, but this must be said if we are to avoid preaching a God who is not so much loving as simply indulgent.

God’s love for us must come first, for we are powerless to change ourselves, but if God’s love, the love that took Christ to the cross, truly has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit (5:5), then change will come.

There is a very long-standing debate as to whether the love spoken of in 5:5 is God’s own love for us or our love for God, since Paul’s Greek can bear either meaning. Everything in the context, where God’s own love is repeatedly emphasized, suggests that it is to this that Paul refers here. But God’s own love is exactly what we need to transform us and to enable us to love both God and neighbor more. Human love responds to beauty, but God’s love creates beauty out of nothing where otherwise there is ugliness.

Paul introduces the theme of divine love because he is spelling out the consequences of his previous argument about justification by faith (3:21–4:25). It is because of their justification through faith in Christ that those who believe now have peace with God (5:1). They have been able to access (the image is of gaining entrance to an otherwise restricted area, such as a royal throne room or a temple sanctuary) this right standing before God through grace. This grace is the undeserved favor shown to the ungodly and the unworthy by God through Jesus.

Yet because of where and to whom it grants access, it is not enough simply to note that grace is undeserved favor. Grace becomes a location, for those who are justified stand under it (5:2) so that it is the place where they now live new lives: “God’s gift creates a new realm of existence characterized by undeserved welcome, which in turn becomes the new foundation for the self and the community.”²

This new foundation for life leads Paul to want to boast in the hope of sharing in God’s glory when Christ returns and all creation is redeemed (see 8:18–25). Because it is founded upon God’s grace, this boasting is not about any aspect of human achievement or worthiness. Ironically, the only human thing that can be swept up into this boasting in the hope of glory is that part of human life normally regarded as least compatible with glory, which is suffering (5:3). Hope becomes a way of life in which suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character (literally, the condition of having been tested and proved genuine), and character produces hope (5:3–4).

These claims raise difficult but important questions. Is Paul saying that suffering is good? And does he inadvertently provide a resource to those who would sustain injustice by telling the oppressed that their suffering is beneficial? Certainly, this text can be misused in these ways. But there are reasons Paul risks saying what he does.

One is that he knows that in Roman culture, to worship a crucified criminal like Jesus will be regarded as shameful. To do so is to identify with slaves and others at the bottom of the social pile who will be no strangers to affliction. God has chosen what is low and despised in the world (1 Corinthians 1:28), and to embrace the gospel and accept the suffering that follows is to be aligned with this divine choice over and against value systems that exalt the strong.

Further, this divine choice of what is low and despised, expressed in the suffering of God’s Son, means that through him “all human suffering can be an opportunity for meeting God and growing in hope.”³ This does not mean that suffering is good, but it does mean that no suffering can place the sufferer beyond the power of God’s love. And it is this love without limits that took Jesus to his death for our sakes, and which has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit (5:5).

Notes

1. Luther’s Works 31:57.
2. Susan G. Eastman, Romans: An Interpretation Bible Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2025), 98.
3. Eastman, Romans, 108.