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Many of you have questioned my metaphor of the Amazon boxes, and Paul’s thesis that “all are justified” (Romans 3:24). Evangelicalism teaches Paul’s Gospel differently, claiming we start as outsiders and that conversion makes God like us. For your sake, I’d like to show how Paul’s Gospel aligns with that ofJesus. This brief sidebar will give you confidence that scripture comports, and that the Gospel revealed in this series, is biblical justified and Christologically centered, not error.

⁶³ It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. ⁶⁴ But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.)⁶⁵ And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” ⁶⁶ After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. ⁶⁷ So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” (John 6:63-67)

In Jesus words to his disciples, we can see how the Spirit led Paul to the same framework of the Flesh versus the Spirit. Additionally, we see that “believing” is not in a religion, but in Jesus as the Christ, sent from God with the words of life. John starts his Gospel with:

^“The true light, which gives light to everyone, (Amazon boxes) was coming into the world.” (John 1:9)

John 6 records how many of his disciples turned back and walked away from Jesus, revealing that Jesus’ Gospel locates people “inside” first, but then must “open the gifts” and come to love the Governor, and many are not willing, resulting in unbelief. Religion teaches us that coming to Christ is conversion to the Christian religion… but Christianity didn’t exist at this time. Religion has always had this backwards. The Gospel reveals that coming to Christ is accepting (seeing) the gift of grace, granted by God. We begin with God “for us” on the “inside” and most of us wander off. The bread of life (Big Love) is harder to believe than religion, so in leaving Christ we automatically embraces a religion resulting our death, not New Life.

“For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on(sees) the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:40)

Seeing is Believing.

Our sidebar is not “an” example, it IS THE FRAMEWORK of reality. We start in God, and by faith and Christ following, dwell in God forever. It’s unnerving to discover that our faith has been in religion, and not Christ. The Gospel frees us from religious overreach to find our true self hidden in Christ, found in God. You’ll know you’ve eaten of the bread of life when you see the money changers in the temple profiting from a religious transaction, and you say: This can’t be Jesus’ Church.

Back to Paul’s exhortation in Romans 8 that nothing compares to this experience of being found in Christ. We are all in, but we are not all in…love. May the grace of his words wash over each of us. There is no religion to join or leave. All we must do is “consider” (logizomai) the words of life, as if they applied specifically to you…because they do.

³¹ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³² He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? ³³ 

Please pause with this. God is FOR YOU…ALWAYS. Open that gift. Discover what this means. If everything is fighting you, if plans aren’t working out, it doesn’t mean God is against you, it means God is FOR YOU, frustrating our effort, calling you home. Our struggle and pain are gifts to be opened. Avoiding these is to avoid God’s design and path to freedom. If we know suffering, we know Christ, and this means God is for us. God’s favor does not keep us from suffering, it brings us through it in love. God didn’t spare Jesus, he won’t spare you. Paul’s message is that we get what Christ got…suffering and Glory.

Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 

There that word again (dikaiõn-justifying, setting free, acquitting). We already know that ALL ARE JUSTIFIED (Romans 3:24), but Paul’s theology reveals God doing the work in the present, active, tense. He’s doing it NOW, in us. We have ALL been chosen (hèklektós), because “there is no distinction” (3:22), Sorry John Calvin and you elitists on Reformation Viagra, the “chosen” cannot be a small sect of Christians any more than they could be only the Jews. These ideological frameworks fail under Paul’s Gospel. The atonement is NOT limited.

³⁴ Who is to condemn?

Stop. Please. I beg you. Pause. Be still with this. Like Jesus to the woman caught in adultery; “Neither do I condemn you.” (John 8:11). Yes, God sees our sin…every bit of it. Paul’s too. Our anthropology is a dialectic self, both sinners and justified, both/and, not either/or (7:25). No matter what we’ve done, or how far from home we’ve wandered, or how calloused our heart has become…God sees. Like the father of the prodigal son, he will allow you to leave with all your inheritance (Luke 15), but coming home there is no condemnation, only a ring, a robe, a festival joy. Why would any of us run from such goodness, except that we don’t understand it. If this is the biblical image of God, who is the god religion gives us?

Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.³⁵ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?³⁶ As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
    we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Paul is on a roll. We must understand the Christological continuum (dimmer switch) principle or we will make binary assumptions about God, even doubting his existence. From a Plank length to Eternity, in narrow as Jesus who suffered and died, to the width eternal intercessor, we ARE THE BELOVED CHILDREN OF GOD. That is WHO WE ARE!!!! Who can separate us from that? Where on the continuum can a person no find themselves? Voltaire said, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” Whether we running from home, or coming back, there is no place where God isn’t. We do not exist, except in God loving us into life each moment.

In closing, I will let Paul’s words summarize the bigness of his Gospel. Compare the scale of God’s love in Christ for all of us, to our tiny doctrines where God save only a few. This is the unfiltered Good News, and it comes to all humanity. Our ability to hear it depends on where we are on the continuum. Therefore, I pray you do hear it TODAY. Christ is more than a mindset, or a religious framework. Christ is the personal force of God’s love which can be trusted more than a therapist, a pastor, family, science, politics and certainly our gut or feelings. Christ is the experience of freedom and life…Beyond Everything.

Take it away Paul:

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.