Let Us Have Peace!
“Therefore, being justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”- — Rom. v. 1.
THis initial word “‘ therefore” sends us back to the earlier part of the apostle’s letter. We cannot leap into the course of the letter at any place we please and disregard every other part of the journey. We must accompany the apostle the whole length of the road. It is of the first importance that we not only arrive at the right places, but that we arrive there by the right approach. The approach is an essential factor in the mystery of revelation. There is a way of approaching Jerusalem which lays it out before you in fascinating perspective and proportion. There are poems whose worth is only betrayed by the right approach. There are two or three poems of Francis Thompson which only begin to live as you come upon them through certain queer, dingy windings in his life. But it is probable that this sort of reasoning applies to everything, and that for everything there is ‘“‘a way’ of understanding.
What, then, is the approach suggested by this retrospective word ‘“‘ therefore’?? Let us look back over the road already traversed. It began in a grim, dismal, depressing waste of sin, a waste from which there was no way out. It is almost Dantean in the completeness of its bondage and misery. Everybody has lost his righteousness, and everybody has lost his power to recapture it. Many devices are tried, and many, many attempts are made to escape, but all struggles are ineffective. The spiritual landscape revealed in the early part of this letter is as black and gloomy as Dartmoor round about Princetown Gaol. And there is no way of escape. In this horrible bondage every man is a prisoner for life.
No way out! No, not until God Himself made a way, a new and a living way. The infinite Love met our deep necessity, and across the waste a path appears which brightens more and more even into perfect day. In the atoning love and grace of Jesus Christ the prisoners of despair become the children of eternal hope. Through the mystery of a Cross everybody can recover his crown. In a death whose mystery no one can explore we find the springs of a new life. And so completely does the divine grace meet our necessity that we may not only leave the imprisoning desert, we can also drop our bonds and our chains. The offered freedom is not only one of status, it is also one of strength and provision. It is more than an amnesty, more than a decree of emancipation. It is an endowment and a bequest. It is the liberty of health. It is the freedom of harmony.
‘* Heaven comes down our souls to greet, And glory crowns the mercy seat.”
And so this letter begins in clouds and darkness, but the black skies are rent at the end of the fourth chapter, and the blue heavens appear and the Kingdom of Heaven is opened to all believers.
And it is just here that we come up to that word ‘‘ Therefore.” ‘ Therefore, seeing we are justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is not an assertion that we have peace. It is an appeal to take it. An amnesty is offered; take it! Free pardon is proclaimed; take it! But can anyone be so foolish as to see a wonderful deliverance of this kind and not accept it? Can we see the great possibility and not translate it into glad experience? Yes, that is the strange suggestion. Peace is offered, a peace which passeth understanding, but men won’t have it. Men will even trudge up to the
2 very Cross with their crushing burdens upon their backs, and then they turn away as though nothing had happened there, and they go on carrying their burdens with them. It is the one amazing mystery of human folly. Here is an appointed place where the heavy-laden pilgrim can lay down his load and find rest and peace. But no! He turns again to the dismal wilderness and to his bonds and imprisonment. We should surely have expected that when Canaan is offered to men and women they would fly from the desert. We should surely have assumed that when peace is spread before us we should fling ourselves down into it, as into a sweet flowering meadow, and we should steep our weary souls in the restoring and reconciling grace of God.
What, then, shall we say to these things? Well, let us go over the road again which leads up to this great appealing word. Let us go over it very slowly. Let us stay with things long enough to feel them, Let us linger at the thirty-second verse of the first chapter, and at the fourth verse of the second chapter, and at the twentieth and twenty-third verses of the third chapter. Let us make a stop at every one of these places, changing all the plural numbers into the singular number, until we have read ourselves into a full understanding of the sacred word. And then more than anywhere else let us stay long at the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter: ‘‘ Jesus Christ, Whom God has sent forth to be a propitiation for our sins.” Let everybody find himself in that all-enclosing word “‘ our.” Let us kneel at the Cross, and let us stay there until vital feelings begin to stir in the numb heart, and it is as though the winter is over and gone.
And for a second counsel let this be given; let us steadily look away from self to Christ. Here is a passage from one of Keble’s letters which I think is pregnant with sound spiritual advice: ‘‘I hold it to be a selfish and dangerous sort of thing for people to be always turning their eyes inward. Please not to let your own faults or anything uncomfortable be often uppermost. It is not natural it should be so in those for whom Christ died.’ No, it is not natural. The only natural thing is that we should be so fascinated and enraptured by the grace of Christ that faults and discomforts and fears and our sins will all be swallowed up in His glory. And therefore let us believingly and confidently accept His peace. Let us joyfully forget a heap of our own things! Let us joyfully remember the things that are in Christ! And in a joyful and enkindling hope let us go along our road in blessedness and peace.