I am proud of the good news, for it is the power of God which produces salvation for every one who believes, to the Jew first and to the Greek. The way to a right relationship with God is revealed in it when man’s faith responds to God’s fidelity, just as it stands written, “It is the man who is in a right relationship with God as a result of his faith who will live.” Romans 1:16, 17.

Please bear with me. I’m going to share from The Letter to the Romans by William Barclay, which is a commentary on the Book of Romans. Barclay writes about faith and I’m going to jump to the amazing part: “(iii) There is the conception of justification. Now there are no more difficult words to understand than justification, justify, justice and just, in all the New Testament. We shall have much occasion in this letter to meet them. At this point we can only lay down the broad lines on which all Paul’s thought proceeds….” Jumping ahead a bit Barclay discusses justification…”If we justify ourselves, we produce reasons to prove that we were right; if someone justifies us, he produces reasons to prove that we acted in the right way….If God justifies a sinner, it does not mean that he finds reasons to prove that he was right – far from it. It does not even mean, at this point, that he makes the sinner a good man. It means that God treats the sinner as if he had not been a sinner at all. Instead of treating him as a criminal to be obliterated, God treats him as a child to be loved. That is what justification means. It means that God reckons us not as his enemies but as his friends, not as bad men deserve, but as good men deserve, not as law-breakers to be punished, but as men and women to be loved. That is the very essence of the gospel (my highlight added). That means that to be justified is to enter into a new relationship with God, a relationship of love and confidence and friendship, instead of one of distance and enmity and fear. We no longer go to a God radiating just but terrible punishment. We go to a God radiating forgiving and redeeming love. Justification (dikaiousune) is the right relationship between God and man. The man who is just (dikaios) is the man who is in this right relationship, and – here is the supreme point – he is in it not because of anything that he has done, but because of what God has done. He is in this right relationship not because he has meticulously performed the works of the law, but because in utter faith he has cast himself on the amazing mercy and love of God. In the Authorized Version we have the famous and highly compressed phrase, The just shall live by faith. Now we can see that in Paul’s mind this phrase meant – It is the man who is in a right relationship with God, not because of the works of his hands, but because of his utter faith in what the love of God has done, who really knows what life is like in time and in eternity. And to Paul the whole work of Jesus was that he had enabled men to enter into this new and precious relationship with God. Fear was gone and love had come. Then God whom men had thought an enemy had become a friend.”

Wow. How can I not share this? I love the truth of God’s Gospel. Paul has always been hard for me to understand. That’s why I love the help of the Holy Spirit and of men and women who themselves were led by the Holy Spirit to grow into the understanding Paul grasped with Jesus teaching him. Good News indeed!!!