The Story You Hoped Was True – is True!
A Devotion based on Romans 5:1–8
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand… You see at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly… God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:1-2a, 6, 8
The world is not a peaceful place. Anxiety crowds us. We feel it growing as we read the headlines from our news feeds. Story after story that overwhelm us with a sense of helplessness. They report details about things that we cannot do anything about.
And we feel a lack of peace closer to home, in strained relationships within our families, in our friendship circles, even in our church family.
In the world, there’s an underlying vague sense that something is not right, and so we look for a remedy. We scroll and consume, seeking to distract ourselves with achievements, likes, aspirations, distractions. We look within, we try harder. And yet the anxiety persists and often grows.
The Bible has always named a deeper root. Beneath our surface restlessness lies something older and more serious: a broken relationship with the God who made us. The prophet Isaiah put it plainly — “There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.” (Isaiah 48:22) Not a comfortable verse. But an honest one. What we have lost, going all the way back to the garden, is our original peace with God — the settled shalom of knowing God to be God, receiving Him as God, loving Him, and trusting Him. Finding our rest in Him. No self-improvement or consumption can restore what only God can give back.
In Romans 5 Paul has some good news for us. A medicine for our lack of peace. Paul declares the cure: “…we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Justified: declared not guilty. Peace: restored. The relationship, healed. How? Through what Paul describes, in just a few powerful verses, as the most startling fact of all human history.
It’s been called the great substitution.
It sits at the heart of the Christian gospel. Paul emphasises what makes it so extraordinary: “At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” Not for the good. Not for those who have ‘got it all together’. Not for those who had earned it in some way, or even who were on their way to deserving it.
Jesus gave himself for the ungodly, for us.
For you and me, as we actually were — and are.
There is a story told about a man in the 1800s who operated a railway drawbridge over a river. His job was straightforward: raise the bridge for passing boats, lower it in time for the trains. One day, with the bridge open and a boat gliding through below, he suddenly heard the whistle and rush of a train arriving early. He saw its smoke and heard it thundering towards the gap. He knew that there were hundreds of unsuspecting passengers on board, heading towards an unexpected abyss.
He raced for the control house. But as he reached the levers and looked down into the mechanism, he saw, to his horror, his young son — playing in the gears of the machinery.
Lower the bridge, and the boy dies. But hundreds of lives are saved. Avoid the sacrifice and the reverse will be true.
It is an unbearable image. And whether or not the story is historically true, we recognise it immediately. We recognize it because it echoes something we find across human storytelling in every age and culture: the dilemma of self-sacrifice so that others may live. Time and again we encounter stories, in literature in film, in mythology, where the sacrifice that saves is the crux of the story.
A great, selfless, loving, substitution. We keep returning to this story because something deep in us is drawn to it, hungers for it, hopes it might be real.
I believe we keep telling that story because it is an echo of the ultimate story. The story that is actually true.
“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The Father did not spare his own Son, but there’s even more to it – the Son came freely, willingly, out of love for you. He chose the cross. He gave his life. He stood in the gap. He bore what we could not bear, so that we might receive what we could never earn.
The peace that Paul describes in Romans 5 is not a feeling, though it may produce one. It is a verdict — declared once for all, two thousand years ago, and delivered to you again and again in word and sacrament. You are forgiven. You are justified. You have peace with God – because he substituted Himself for you.
This peace holds even when life is hard. Paul goes on: we also glory in our sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope. And hope, he says, does not disappoint — because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. (See Romans 5:3-5)
The peace of God is not the absence of difficulty. It is a foundation that holds beneath everything else.
The story you hoped was true, is true. Freely you have received it. Freely pass it on.
