Romans 5:12-21

 Romans 5:12-21

What could be worse than having a life-ending, misery-causing, nasty disease? To have such a disease and not know it. To have all the symptoms of a grave illness and not know you are sick, and therefore not work for a cure is the condition of all mankind regarding sin. From Adam to Moses, there was a certainty that something was wrong, but what it was and how bad it was remained a terrible mystery. Then the law of Moses brought the diagnosis. The diagnosis revealed that the problem, the illness, was sin. The diagnosis revealed it was a more pervasive, more advanced, and more ruinous disease than we expected. At this point the good news was we knew what was wrong. The bad news is the diagnosis is not the same thing as a cure. We should never discount the value of an accurate diagnosis, nor can we discount the value of the law that condemns us for our sin. But to this point we are still a dying patient.

The cure is linked to the diagnosis, but it’s something altogether different. Law is the means of diagnosis. Grace is the means of the cure. That is why we can never be made right by keeping a set of rules or laws. A patient is never cured by consistently repeating the diagnostic test. By trying to keep a set of rules, we are reminded that we have, at some point, failed. The repeated diagnosis may cause us to do something differently so that the disease may be spreading more slowly at one time or another. But it is still there, and we remain uncured. Until Grace is applied, the law or rule-keeping can only tell us how fast we are dying.

The cure is greater than the illness in more than one way. First, the cure is greater than the illness, in that it completely removes the disease. The illness is removed from the body, and there are not any infections or diseased cells left. But there is more. Many times with a biological illness, the cure is devastating. The patient, while disease-free, is so damaged by the cure that they are scared and remain broken. This brings us to the second aspect of the cure of grace.  Not only does the cure remove the illness, it restores the damage done by the disease. Imagine an illness that causes the body to rot and parts of the body to fall off. In this mangled, rotting body, the cure removes the disease and perfectly restores those parts that had rotted away. That is what sin, law, and grace do in us. They are the disease, the diagnosis, and the cure. All we have lost to sin is healed and restored to us in the grace of Christ.

“Lord, thank You for the cure that you so graciously give.  AMEN”