Even More Really Real--February 26, 2026

Even More Really Real--February 26, 2026

"But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many." (Romans 5:15)

"Much more surely..." he says.  What a notion.

You know, as many times as I have heard and read these words from Romans (including this past Sunday when I heard them again, as many other did, in worship), I don't think that phrase struck me before, really.  "Much more surely," Paul says, "have the grace of God and the gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many." What's going on here?

Well, for starters, that phrase sounds like it is the second half of a longer train of thought... because it is.  The beginning of the sentence starts with the impact of sin in the world through our ancestral progenitors, calling back to the old story of Adam from the early chapters of Genesis.  "If the many died through the one man's trespass," he begins, before concluding, "much more surely..." that the grace of God has abounded just as far and wide as the effects of sin.  Paul's point is to say that however broadly death and sin have infected the world, God's gift of grace through Jesus is just as big and expansive.  There is no place that sin and death have spread that Christ's life-giving grace does not also reach.

Now, that by itself is a pretty powerful claim, and it is worth letting that sink in for a minute. Paul himself says that as many people have been affected by the reverberating impact of sin are also as many as have been recipients of the grace of God because of Jesus. There is no place where sin still holds on that grace cannot get to.  There no place that death can run that grace does not have higher jurisdiction.  And that means there is really no such thing as "falling from grace," despite the use of that phrase over the generations.  You simply cannot "fall from grace"--at least, not in the sense of ever having messed up so badly into the gravitational grip of sin that you are beyond the reach of God's freely given grace to raise us back up to new life.   Paul insists that wherever sin and death skulk, grace has already staked a claim there, too, because of Christ.

But that's not all.  This is where I just can't get over that phrase, "much more surely."  Because the thrust of that phrase is to say that grace isn't merely equal in impact with sin and death--grace's effectiveness is even more certain than what sin and death have wrought on the world.  Grace isn't just wishful thinking or a pipe dream about how nice it would be if only God were so generous and unconditionally loving.  It is a certainty--even more certain than the effects of sin and death on the world.

And, to be clear, sin is pretty obviously real and "out there" in the world.  The old line says that "the doctrine of sin is the one theological claim that can be demonstrated just by reading the news or looking out the window without having the Bible to back it up."  In other words, we would know about the truth of sin and the reality of death even if we didn't have Bible verses telling us about them.  Our daily routines are full of evidence of our crooked actions, inverted values, casual cruelties, habitual greed, and seemingly endless ability to make things into idols.  And our lives are constantly touched by the reality of death, from the loss of loved ones and friends to the death toll on the news from war zones and disasters.  If there is anything we can verify as real concerns in the real world, sin and death should be them.  And yet, Paul says, for however sure we think we are about sin and death and their power, "much more surely" has the grace of God abounded. If life experience tells us that sin and death are real, Paul says that grace is even more really real. You can count on it, even more certainly that you already know about sin's pull and death's grip. The gracious gift of God to bring life is even more sure, according to the apostle, than death's power to hold us down.

Now, if Paul is right (and I'm willing to wager that he is), that changes everything about how we face the world.  A great deal of our lives right now are shaped, not only by death, but by our fear of death.  Our fear of what a stranger might do to us leads us to see any unfamiliar face as a possible threat rather than a neighbor. Our fear of not having enough of what we need for life leads us to hoard things.  Our fear of the unknown (and our assumption that whatever is unknown is automatically dangerous) leads us to put up walls in our lives and view everyone outside them as hostile.  Death, it turns out, has a lot of power over us even beyond its capacity to stop our hearts and cut us off from loved ones--it has the ability to suck the joy out of our lives while we are living and replacing it with fear!  But that's why Paul's point is so important.  Because grace's power "much more surely" abounds, we don't need to treat death like it gets the last word. Because grace is even more fundamentally real than sin and death are, we don't have to let death infect us with fear or taint our vision to see everything as a threat.  Because grace is more dependable than even what seemed the utter certainty of death, we don't have to let ourselves waste our lives being afraid of death.  It doesn't get the last word.  We no longer have to treat sin and selfishness as though they are inevitable and that we "have to" give into them--we don't.  We no longer have to let death make us afraid of everyone and everything.  Those realities are not as solid, not as firm, not as fundamental, as the truth of God's grace in Jesus Christ.

The only question left, really, is whether we will live like it is true.

Lord Jesus, give us the bravery and boldness in our faith to trust your grace more solidly than we fear the power of sin and death over us.