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The Daily Word of Righteousness
Death and Resurrection
Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. (II Peter 3:15,16—NIV)
The sixth chapter of the Book of Romans may well be the clearest exposition of the new covenant to be found in the Scriptures. The most important aspect of new-covenant grace is our union with Christ in His crucifixion and our union with Him in His resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God. Our union with Christ's crucifixion and resurrection distinguishes the Divine redemption from all other religions and philosophies.
It is amazing that God entrusted to one man, the Apostle Paul, the explanation of the change from the Law of Moses to the new covenant of the Lord Jesus Christ. It appears that the actual nature and mechanism of the new covenant is difficult enough to be misunderstood to the present day.
The first five chapters of the Book of Romans include Paul's argument against the Jews. Paul's position is that the Divine grace given through the Lord Jesus has superseded the Law of Moses. The works of the Law of Moses no longer are God's way of righteousness. The works of the Law are not to be mixed with the new covenant.
Paul states again his position emphatically in a later chapter:
And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work. (Romans 11:6)
Paul realized that his doctrine could be perverted to mean that righteous behavior no longer is required.
For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just. (Romans 3:7,8)
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? (Romans 6:1)
The relationship between Moses and Christ was difficult even for the original Apostles to understand. They quarreled among themselves concerning the role of the Law in the Christian redemption.
But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? (Galatians 2:14)
Paul stressed that we please God by faith in Christ whom God has sent, that God cannot be satisfied any longer by our observance of the Law of Moses.
Then Paul in his letter to the Galatians, as he does in the sixth chapter of Romans, pointed out that our adherence to Christ as the means of our righteousness, apart from obedience to Moses, does not mean that we now are free to sin.
But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid. (Galatians 2:17)
To be continued.