Last week we dove into the first section of our book study of Romans. We covered chapters 1-3 on sin. If you missed the Facebook Live video from last week, you can watch it here.

This week we will be discussing chapters 3:21-5:19 of the book of Romans and diving into the main theme of this grouping of chapters: salvation. We won't be reading through the chapters tonight but will instead discuss main points, verses, and takeaways from these passages. 

I did add the charts from Part 1 to the website so feel free to download those as we continue in our study. The little arc chart I made was only for part one about sin, but the larger chart will break down Romans as a whole and is something we will be using each week. The downloads can be found here. (You will need to add them to your cart and "checkout"- no payment required. They will then send to your email you input at checkout).

The overall theme of these chapters is righteousness and that it is given by divine grace through faith. This is where Paul really begins to bridge the gap between sin and salvation and explain why by grace through faith we are able to have salvation regardless of our sin. 

The four main parts of these passages about Salvation are broken down like so:

1. Righteousness Through Faith

2. Abraham Justified by Faith

3. Peace and Hope

4. Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

Righteousness through Faith

The first section regarding righteousness through faith explains to the Church in Rome that we/they are all equally unrighteousness and that Christ is righteousness. Because of His righteousness and His sacrifice of atonement we are extended salvation by faith. Here are a couple of the key verses from this section:

"²² the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. ²⁶ It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus."

Abraham Justified by Faith

The second heading section in these passages about salvation in Romans gives an old testament example of a man who was justified by his faith in God. I love that Paul teaches the church using examples from the Old Testament to show them examples of great acts of faith. Obviously those in the OT did not have the same gift of salvation extended to them because Christ had not yet come.

I think that we often get tripped up about the purpose of the OT and what we should learn from it and Paul does a great job of showing us how to apply lessons from the OT to our lives. Though Christ had not yet died on the cross to atone for our sins, people in the Old Testament still had great Faith in God. The law of the OT was done away with once Christ came- meaning the Mosaic law is no longer one we must follow. Just because the OT is no longer the law we are governed under doesn't mean it is not still applicable to our lives! We can get so many great examples of those who did big things for God and acted on their faith from these books. Romans 4:20-25 explain how through Abraham's belief in the promises God had made credited him righteousness- just as our own belief that Jesus was raised to life for our salvation. 

"²⁰ No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹ fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²² That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” ²³ But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, ²⁴ but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, ²⁵ who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification."

Peace and Hope

This section details that because we have been justified through faith, we now have peace and hope with God. This is such a good passage to flip to when you are going through something rough and need to be reminded of just how much God loves us. Here are a couple of my favorite verses from this section (Chapter 5):

³ Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

¹⁰ For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

This section is offers this amazing parallelism between how the disobedience of one man (Adam) led to death, sin, and condemnation but through another man (Jesus) the gift of life and justification is given. A piece of this passage I found especially interesting was Romans 5:13-14.

¹³ for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. ¹⁴ Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

This explains that no one had sinned yet until a command was broken. We know from the book of Genesis that Adam broke God's commandment and thus sin was committed and would be passed down to all those to come as a pattern of sin and condemnation. 

The rest of this passage is fairly self explanatory, but I did want to call out two more verses that are so powerful from this section:

¹⁶ And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.

¹⁹ For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

Other key items from Romans Part 2: Salvation:

• We see from these passages that the gospel provides free justification
• In this section we get the fullness of God's plan for our salvation and the opportunity to be saved from our sins
• Chapters 3:21-5 focus on WHEN I was saved- when I believed and was given grace through faith
• This section has parallelisms to the book of Exodus- redemption offered
• This part of the book of Romans is all about Faith