Rom. 8:32 ... "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?"
It is the fate of people in this life to be participants in the war between good and evil. In every circumstance of our daily experience we must make a choice whether we will take the side of good and oppose evil, or embrace evil and oppose good. Jesus once said, "He who is not with Me is against Me," and also, "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree rotten, and its fruit rotten; for the tree is known by its fruit, (Mat. 12:30,33). These statements yield no middle position between good and evil, or between Christ and Satan. The evil presents itself to us as temptations which entice us with appealing rewards for accepting them. We are never free of these temptations, since evil is always present about us. Furthermore, it is a fact that everyone falls victim to some of these temptations and thus involves himself in evil, and with this sin in our lives we know that we incur the wrath of God.
It is very discouraging to realize that sin corrupts us in spite of our best efforts to prevent it and that God is daily offended at our failures. There are people who hold back from Christian profession because they are aware of this discouragement and unwilling to experience its tension. Others, who make a start in the Christian life, eventually forsake it when this problem begins to build. In Matthew 13 in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus described the disciple who "when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately falls away," (v.21). It is indeed depressing to declare by one's faith and obedience that he is taking the side of righteousness when he knows from the outset he will often fail.
The eighth chapter of Romans addresses this problem with a strong message of encouragement for the Christian who wants to live true to his Lord. Although God condemns sin and will judge the sinner, He nevertheless still loves those whose lives are colored by sin. His justice demands that sin be punished, but His mercy appeals for patience. And so we find in II Pet. 3:9, "The Lord ... is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." In infinite wisdom possessed only by God, He found a way to meet the demands of divine justice and yet extend mercy. This way is presented most succinctly in the initial text above. First, "He ... did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." Jesus took the place of everyone who lives in this world when He went to the crucifixion and paid the ultimate price for our sins. As the prophet said, "He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed," (Isa. 53:5). Second, God shows us great mercy in our sins, for as the lead text above says, "How will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" That is, just as the Father supplied His Son with everything He needed to complete His mission of human redemption, He will likewise give us everything we need to be recipients of that redemption in the end.
God did not sacrifice His Son for nothing; He gave Him up to a cruel death to save us from the same fate for our sins. He knows our struggle against evil and our frequent defeats, but He wills that, though we lose many battles, we should not lose the war and suffer our souls to be destroyed. He will daily supply us with "all things" by which we can recover from our failures and be saved. We are assured in Rom. 5:21 that "as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." In short, God will remit our sins day by day if we continue to repent and keep up the struggle against sin, and if we never cease to "keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God," (Col. 3:1).
