Yet there is another boast we have as believers, in virtue of Christ's death and resurrection; and it is infinite, though entered on already. It is not now simply in hope of the glory of God; nor is it in our tribulations, looking on to the end of the Lord in them and the consequent profit meanwhile. This had drawn out a most blessed unfolding of what God is. His love is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Ghost given to us. He commends his own love to us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us
There are consequences drawn; but they are not drawn from counsels about us, but from what He is, and has done for us when we were in our sins. There was no motive but in Himself; the objects of His love were the merest sinners. Hence we exult in much more than His ways with us, or the glorious hoped for result; “and not only [so], but also [we are] boasting in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we now received the reconciliation.”
Truly this is the climax: we exult in God! Higher we cannot go. In this we do boast through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has given us the most excellent gifts, but, better than all, Himself. For this, as for all the rest, we are indebted to Jesus; and we may even say, boldly yet most truly, that only through Jesus could God be what He is as the highest spring, ground, and object, of our boasting. “Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God be glorified in him,” said the Savior, “God will glorify him in himself and will straightway glorify him.” “And not only so, but we glory in God through our Lord Jesus.” Blessed fruit above, yea and even below!
Through Him also now we received the reconciliation; for so the apostle wrote, not the propitiation, but the “reconciliation.” Without that mighty work of Christ on the cross we could not indeed, being sinners, be reconciled to God; but this is the theme here—the complete making good of our case with God with whom we had been at war, and from whom we were wholly estranged by our sins. In Rom. 3:2525Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; (Romans 3:25), we were shown how God justified us freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom He set forth a propitiatory (or mercy-seat) through faith in His blood. Thus He could be propitious spite of our sins which were fully met by the blood of Jesus. But the first half of chapter v. brings in His love and consequently the reconciliation, which we have now received through Christ, impossible without His atoning death, but going much farther in itself.
The chapters that follow can scarcely be thought to carry the soul into a deeper blessedness. Privileges are there very fully developed, security is more elaborately affirmed of the Christian in the face of adverse circumstances and enemies, in chapter viii. above all; but I know not that any joy even there rises up to the boasting in God we find here. It is at once the occasion for the heart both of the most profound repose and of the utmost spiritual activity. Worship is its expression. The outflow of the joy of the redeemed in the rest of God is thus anticipated. We begin the new song that will never end; and as it is here and now through our Lord Jesus, is it not so much the sweeter to our God? Thus the deepest inward poison that Satan insinuated into man at the fall is not merely counteracted but triumphed over to the praise of God, He thus acquires His due place; but it is such a place of trustful delight as never could have been for the creature save as the result of Himself known as He is now by redemption—the God who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ.