Know Jesus, Know Peace

One thing I keep in mind whenever I read Romans is that Paul had not actually been to Rome when he wrote it. He says so in the letter: he had long wanted to visit and kept being prevented (Romans 1:13; 15:22). So this is not a pastor writing to a congregation he planted and knows by name. It is a careful introduction of himself and his message to a church he hoped to reach, a church made up of both Jewish and Gentile believers in the capital of the empire.

That setting matters for chapter 5. Paul is not improvising a comforting line. By the time he reaches the words about peace with God, he has spent four chapters building a case: that everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, has fallen short, and that being put right with God comes by trusting him rather than by earning it, with Abraham held up as the great example (Romans 4). Romans 5:1 is the moment the argument turns from courtroom to relationship. It is the breath out after a long inhale. Knowing that Paul wrote it as a reasoned summary, and not as a throwaway encouragement, has always made the peace here feel more solid to me, not less.

There is a detail here that most readers will never see in English, and I think it is worth knowing. In the oldest Greek manuscripts there is a difference of a single letter that turns “we have peace” into “let us have peace”. One reading is a statement; the other is an invitation. It is a real difference, and scholars are genuinely divided over which Paul wrote. I cannot settle that. But what strikes me is that the wider logic of Romans plainly treats peace as something already true because of what Christ has done, rather than a mood we have to work ourselves into.

So I read it as a declaration. The verb is present and steady: this peace is a possession, not a target. Notice too that Paul does not say we feel peaceful. He says we have “peace with God”, which is relational language, the language of two parties who were at odds and are no longer. The short reflection here calls it having one heart, and that is exactly the register. The easy thing to miss is that the peace is named as a settled fact about a relationship before it is ever described as a feeling in your chest.

Peace with God is not a New Testament invention. It runs back through the whole of Scripture as a deep ache and a promise. The breach Paul assumes in Romans 5 is the same one you meet on the third page of the Bible, where the man and woman hide from God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3). From there the question of how a holy God and guilty people can be at peace shapes everything that follows: the sacrifices, the temple, the long ache of the prophets.

Isaiah saw it with painful clarity, speaking of a suffering servant who would be wounded for the peace of others (Isaiah 53:5), and the first Christians read that servant as Jesus. Paul’s point in Romans is that the peace cost something real. It was not God deciding the quarrel did not matter. It was God dealing with it himself, at the cross, so that the matter could be genuinely closed. That is why the cross-reference to Colossians 1:20, where God makes peace through the cross, sits so well alongside it. And it is why Romans 8:1, only three chapters on, can announce that there is now no condemnation. The peace of 5:1 and the no-condemnation of 8:1 are the same truth seen from two angles. One says the war is over; the other says the verdict is in.

I find the real test of this verse is not Sunday but the middle of an ordinary week, when nothing dramatic has happened and yet I still feel vaguely on the outside with God. Often it is after I have snapped at someone, or let a day slide by prayerless, or simply lain awake replaying an old failure. Guilt has a way of redrawing the whole relationship as a quarrel I have to fix before God will look at me kindly again.

What steadies me is the order of the sentence. Paul puts the being-put-right first and the peace second, and he roots the whole thing “through our Lord Jesus Christ”, not in my recent form. So the peace does not arrive once I have apologised enough or strung together a good run of days. It is already there, because of him. Some mornings the feeling simply never turns up, and I have had to learn that peace with God can be entirely true while my nerves are still frayed. The fact does not wait on the mood. Letting the calm catch up in its own time has helped me far more than any technique for manufacturing it.

“Justified” is not a soft, churchy word. It is a legal one, the language of a verdict. When a judge justifies someone, he does not coax them into a calmer frame of mind or talk them out of their nerves. He declares them to be in the right, and that declaration stands whether they feel vindicated or not. This is the strange, steadying thing Paul is leaning on. Our peace with God rests on a ruling that has already been pronounced over us in Christ, and not on a reading of our own spiritual temperature.

I find that a relief, because moods make unreliable witnesses. Some days I feel forgiven and some days I do not, and neither feeling alters the judgement. A verdict is not reopened every time the defendant has a bad night. If God has declared me right with him through Jesus, the case is closed, and the peace named in the very next breath is simply the proper consequence of that settled verdict.

Look again at how the sentence is built, and notice what it does not say. It does not say we have made peace with God, or worked our way back to him, or finally calmed the quarrel by trying harder. It says we are justified by faith, and faith is the empty hand that simply takes what is offered. The whole weight of the chapter before this one sits underneath it: Abraham believed God, and that trust was counted as putting him in the right, long before he had a single thing to show for it (Romans 4). Peace, then, is received and not achieved.

That order matters on the days I am tempted to earn my way back into God’s good books. The verse keeps putting faith first and effort nowhere. I cannot add to a gift by labouring over it; I can only take it or refuse it. Letting peace be something I receive, rather than a prize I keep chasing, has loosened a grip I did not realise I was holding (Ephesians 2:8).

I have watched Romans 5:1 lifted onto sympathy cards and wellness reels, laid over a sunset, doing the work of a mood you might just as easily get from a hot bath. Paul is not offering serenity. He is reporting a verdict, and the two are not the same size.

The misuse that bothers me most comes from good people, often from a pulpit: telling someone who is frightened that they have peace with God, so why are they still churning? It folds two different peaces into one and leaves them ashamed twice over, once for the fear and once for still having it after being told not to.

The quieter misuse does more damage to a church. Read “we have peace with God” as a remark about the human race in general and you have skated straight past the three words standing in front of it. Justified by faith. Paul did not put them there for decoration. Preach this peace as everybody’s factory setting and you have rewritten Romans while smiling.

If I were teaching this, I would refuse to stop at verse 1, because on its own it floats. Paul does eventually say out loud what the peace was peace from, and he waits until Romans 5:10 to use the word: enemies. Not distant. Not lukewarm. Enemies, reconciled through the death of God’s Son. Read verse 1 and verse 10 back to back and let the room sit in the gap between them, because that gap is the whole reason “peace” is not a soft word here.

Then let verses 2 to 11 carry your second half, because Paul plainly does not treat this peace as somewhere to lie down. It opens into access and standing in grace (5:2), into hope of God’s glory, into the odd, bracing claim that we can rejoice in our sufferings for what they produce in us (5:3 to 5), and it lands on rejoicing in God himself (5:11). A talk that finishes at “you are at peace” has stopped early. Paul’s peace is going somewhere.

The thing I would guard hardest is verse 8. Christ died for us while we were still sinners, not once we had come round to his way of thinking. If people leave thinking the peace was the prize for their turning, the chapter has been handed over backwards.

Here is where I would actually reach for it. The moment after a confession, when sin has been named out loud and forgiveness announced, just before communion. The room needs to hear that the account is settled and not merely postponed, and this sentence says precisely that. It sits well over someone coming up out of the baptismal water too, because it names what has just happened to them.

Funerals want more care than they usually get. For someone whose trust in Christ was known and spoken about, it is a real comfort and I would use it gladly. For someone whose faith you simply do not know about, do not stretch it into a verdict you are in no position to read out. Comfort resting on a claim you cannot back will not hold the family up for long, and they will feel the give in it sooner than you think.

And in the corridor, with someone shaking, leave it in your pocket a while. Sit down first. Ask something. The distinction between a standing and a mood is the kindest thing this verse has to offer a frightened person, and it has to be handed over gently or not at all.

Stop at verse 1 and you miss why Paul thought this peace was worth a whole letter rather than a line in his prayers. A few sentences on he pulls the lens right back, past Rome, past the cross even, all the way to Adam. Sin came into the world through one man, he says, and death through sin, and death spread to everyone after him (Romans 5:12). I have never found a way to make that comfortable. One person’s failure setting the terms for a species offends something in me that wants my account kept separately, thank you. But Paul is not building a bleak case. He is building a springboard. The phrase he cannot stop reaching for in this chapter is “much more” (Romans 5:9, 5:10, 5:15, 5:17), and by verse 20 the sentence he has been running at all along arrives: sin abounded, and grace outran it, not narrowly (Romans 5:20). If one trespass could bring condemnation to everybody (Romans 5:18), how much more can one man’s obedience go the other way. Paul writes that stretch like a man whose arithmetic is making him happy.

I did not expect, the first time I traced it through slowly, how much bigger verse 1 was than my own conscience. I had been reading it as my ledger, cleared. It is that. But it is also Paul telling a mixed room of Jews and Gentiles, in the capital of the known world, that a second humanity has started, headed by Christ the way the first was headed by Adam. The peace in my hands is the opening instalment of that reversal, not the sum of it. Which is why I get impatient when this verse is treated as a private calm. Paul is talking about the whole race changing hands.

Rome already had a peace when this letter arrived, and I think that matters more than we usually let it. The Pax Romana was not a slogan to the people living under it. Peace turned up on the coinage as a goddess with a name, and Augustus had an altar to Peace built in the city and then listed, among the achievements he wanted carved where everyone could read them, the closing of the doors of Janus, shut only when the empire was at rest. That peace meant the legions had finished. Borders held, taxes paid, mouths shut. It was real, it was expensive, and it was somebody else’s achievement handed down to you from above whether you had asked for it or not.

Paul writes into that exact city and tells the church there that they have peace with God. I cannot believe he picked the word by accident. He takes the one term every reader in Rome already had strong feelings about and quietly moves it off Caesar’s coin. This peace was not won by legions and it does not arrive by keeping your head down. It was won at a cross and it arrives by faith. Same word, entirely different throne behind it, and any Roman reading it aloud would have heard the swap.

Here is what used to make me argue with this verse, and if I am honest it still turns up at about two in the morning. If God declares me right with him while I am plainly still not right, has anything actually happened, or has he only agreed to say a kind thing about me? A verdict that does not match the defendant is what we would call a miscarriage in any other court. A friend once put it to me more bluntly over a kitchen table: it sounds like God marking his own homework.

I do not think the way out is to soften “justified” into something warm and vague. Paul’s answer, as far as I can follow him, is that the verdict is no polite fiction because something real stood behind it. God put Christ forward publicly as the place where the sin was actually dealt with, and Paul says the point of that was to demonstrate God’s own righteousness, so that he could be just and the one who justifies at the same time (Romans 3:25 to 26). He saw the objection coming and would not dodge it. God did not wave the debt through. He took it.

Does that settle it in me? Mostly. Not on the bad nights, when the distance between the verdict and the man it was read over looks too wide to be anything but generous accounting. I have stopped expecting to win that argument by feeling better. What steadies me is that Paul had the argument first, two chapters earlier, and did not blink.

Romans 5:1 hands you a verdict. John 14:27 hands you a man in a borrowed room the night before he dies, telling frightened friends he is leaving them his peace, and then adding the warning: not as the world gives. That phrase has followed me for years, because it says up front that this will not look like what everyone else means by the word. The peace the world sells is the absence of a fight. Jesus hands his over on the eve of the worst fight any of them will ever see, with his arrest hours away.

Set the two beside each other and something arrives that neither gives you alone. Romans tells you the peace rests on a fact, a ruling already returned. John tells you it has a face and a voice, someone deliberately leaving it behind like an inheritance before he goes. The courtroom gives it a foundation. The upper room gives it a giver you can picture, saying the words to men who were about to have the worst week of their lives. I need both halves, and I am not proud of that. A verdict I cannot see comforts me less than a verdict handed over by someone who looked at frightened people first.

Children understand a mended quarrel faster than adults do, because most of them had one at lunchtime. The honest way in, I have found, is to ask what it feels like after a proper falling out, the kind where you will not look at each other across the classroom, and then ask what it feels like once someone says sorry and it is genuinely taken, not just papered over so the teacher stops fussing. That gap, between the cold silence and the relief of it being actually finished, is peace in the sense Paul means.

Where I will not soften it is the cost. It is tempting to stop at “God isn’t cross with you any more”, which is true and incomplete, and skip why it is now true. I would rather say plainly that the quarrel being over cost Jesus his life, that God did not simply decide to forget about it, and then let a child sit in the strangeness of that for a moment instead of hurrying them along to the comfort. A room of eight-year-olds can hold two things at once far better than we credit them for: the peace is settled, and it was not free, and both were true on the same afternoon.

• Where do I still treat peace with God as something I have to earn back after I fail, rather than something already secured through Christ?
• When I feel on the outside with God, whose voice am I actually listening to, and does it match what this verse says is true?
• If the quarrel really is over, what would change in how I came to God this week, especially on the days I feel least worthy?
• Who in my life is quietly carrying the weight of feeling unforgiven, and could I gently share this with them?

If you would like to keep going, you might sit with a few more verses on this theme over at /bible-verses-about/, or read on through Paul’s letter at /bible/romans/.