7 For we do not live to ourselves alone and we do not die to ourselves alone. 8 If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. 9 For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living.
10 You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat your brother or sister with contempt? For we will all stand before God's judgment seat. 11 It is written:
" 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord,
'every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will confess to God.' " [a]
12 So then, we will all give an account of ourselves to God.
Dig Deeper
One of the things that I constantly had to remind my students of during my years as a history teacher in high school was whose opinions mattered. I was always amazed at how students would work on projects as though they were more interested in impressing the other students than with me as their teacher. They would work on timelines or maps or other artistic-heavy projects like that and would be much more concerned with earning the praise of their fellow students with flashy looking art rather than the accuracy and precise work that I was looking for. When the assignments of those nature were hung on the wall, the students would often criticize some of the assignments that received high grades because they weren’t artistically spectacular. They would actually treat their fellow student’s work with contempt but they were forgetting something rather important. None of them were being judged by one another in any way that mattered. It was my judgment and my standard that mattered. Students that remembered that did well but those who lost sight of that usually found themselves getting rather nit picky about small things. As a result, their grades suffered because when all was said and done, I was the only judge that mattered.
Paul has deftly answered the question of whether God has been faithful to his covenant promises, which has done by demonstrating that God has thundered a resounding “yes” to all of his promises through the resurrection of Christ. God has created his one family that he promised to Abraham, the Messiah-shaped family that is the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament Scriptures pointed to. The idea of creating and preserving that one family in the Messiah was absolutely vital to Paul. But equally vital, and in fact the truth that the idea of one family in Christ is built on, is the idea that there is one God before whom we all stand and to whom we will all answer. Because God is one and we answer to that one God, we must realize that God works with “ones” to forge his one family. Or as Paul puts it so succinctly in Ephesians 4:3-6: “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
We mustn’t forget as we read through this section that Paul is still building on the foundation of Romans 12:1-2, which in turn stands on the solid ground of being forged into the new resurrection humanity in Christ. Because of the mercy that God has shown us in Christ, we are all to respond properly by presenting ourselves to the holy God as ongoing and continual sacrifices. Thus, everything we do as it pertains to our Christian life will have the aroma of sacrificial death to it. Part of this self-sacrifice is to realize, as Paul has already stated in Romans 12:5 that “in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” At one time we were “not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet. 2:10) because “we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (1 Cor. 12:13).
Although it is true that we are one family, one body, and in that sense we belong to one another, we must always remember that Christ is the head of that body. It is to him alone that we must give account. We belong to one another not based on the worth of each other or because belonging to one another carries with it some inherent benefit because it will occasionally but more often it won’t. No, we belong to one another because we belong to Christ. He is our motivation and our direction.
To make the Lordship of Christ clear, Paul says that “we do not live to ourselves alone and we do not die to ourselves alone.” Many commentators believe that Paul simply means that Christ is our Lord while were living and then even when we die he will continue to be our Lord and be the one who judges us. This would certainly seem to be the case and I would not argue with such an interpretation but I do think that Paul has set up referents throughout his letter to the Romans for us to go back and see something a bit deeper than even that here.
In Romans 6, Paul described the concept of dying to self, participating in the death of Christ, and rising to a new life. Thus Christians have both death and life within them. In his second letter to the Corinthians Paul declared “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:10). Christ resurrected says Paul not so that he could be the Lord of people while they are alive on this earth but then not their Lord in death or vice versa. Christians carry around the duality of death and life in us all the time. We died to self and that is an ongoing sacrifice as we connect with the death of Jesus but we also have life in his resurrected life. When we die to self it is for the Lord and when we live it is for the Lord. Regardless of which way you look at it Christians belong to Christ now because we have entered into the resurrection life which guarantees the future physical resurrection. As Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 6:13 -15, “The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” What Christians do now matters because we have died to self and entered into the resurrection life of Christ. We belong to Christ and he is our Lord both now as we carry around life and death within ourselves and in the age to come. He is truly the Lord of both the living and the dead.
It is simply not ours to begin to determine that a certain group of people is beyond God’s reach or his judgment. This is Paul’s point whether it be made to Gentiles who were arguing that God had given up on the Jews and so should they or to Jews who thought that Gentiles could not be part of the family of God unless they adhered to the tenets of the law. Or more specifically, to keep with Paul’s direct point here, the weak should not begin to judge those who were stronger and had a freer view of faith. In the same token, those that are strong should not begin to look with contempt at those who did not share their embracing of some of the deeper and more freeing truths of the resurrected life. God is the Lord of those who are at all stages of dying to themselves and taking up the resurrected life.
To put a modern face on this, I can think of some Christians who are divergent in their views on alcohol. Some have very sensitive consciences and think that it should be avoided, while others have grasped the freedom of enjoying aspects of God’s creation in reverent moderation. Those who dislike alcohol should not being to judge those who drink as though they are not really Christians after all because they do not take the same view. Yet, those who do feel no pangs of the conscience when drinking alcohol should not begin to look down on their brothers and sisters in disgust as though they are either pitifully weak, narrow-minded, or the dreaded “old school.”
Christians live in the strange in-between land where the age to come has broken into the present age through the resurrected life of the Messiah and we are to live and embrace that life now. The final judgment already began when God condemned sin and death in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ but that judgment will be completed one day. We live between the breaking in of this new life and the final judgment and we are to live our lives in that light. We don’t live or die to ourselves but to the Lord. We deal with our brothers and sisters in the covenant family based on that reality.
But the practical question is how do we handle the situation when two people hold deeply and passionately to different views on disputable matters? How can we possibly be a real community in the harsh reality of of person embracing the freedom of the resurrected life with all their heart and soul while another Christian’s conscience tells them just as clearly that that behavior is not right for them? How can you have one family when this is the case? It is to that very quandary that Paul will turn next.
Devotional Thought
Can you think of other difficult areas in which honest Christians within your church family disagree? What does Paul’s thoughts from Romans 14 add to your consideration on those issues? How does it help us to forge genuine unity despite such differences?
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