When I was talking about the third chapter of Romans, I pointed out that Romans 3 is the heart of the Bible. If that is true, Romans 8 is the Bible’s climax. It is a climax because it takes us from the matter of our deliverance from the penalty and power of sin to that final glorious consummation of our salvation when we are made free from sin in all respects and are brought into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father forever.

Yesterday we looked at propitiation and justification. The third term is redemption. It is a business term. It has to do with buying something back. In the ancient world much of the commerce had to do with the purchase and selling of slaves, and this term relates particularly to slavery. It meant to buy a slave out of slavery and set the slave free. It is what Jesus has done for us. 

Propitiation comes from the world of ancient sacrifices and concerns the wrath of God. Most of us do not like the idea of wrath. We push it off. But the ancients understood more than we do at this point. They knew that God was a God of wrath because they knew they were sinners. Unfortunately, they wrongly thought that they were capable of appeasing that wrath by their actions.

The intellectual dimension involves understanding, and the same principles apply. If we are thinking humanly, there are differences of understanding between people. Some understand a good bit, others not so much. Some can even understand a good bit about theological subjects. There are unbelievers who write theological textbooks. Some of the great studies of the Old and New Testaments are by men who, I would say, are not true believers in Jesus Christ. They have understanding at the human level, but Paul is talking about the kind of understanding that allows us to see ourselves as we really are before God and which turns us to Christ. On that level we have no understanding at all unless God provides it. 

Verses 10 and 11 capsulize Paul’s whole theology on this subject when he writes, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.” When Paul says there is no one righteous, he is talking about the moral dimensions of our being. When he says there is no one who understands, he is talking about the intellectual dimension of our being. When he says there is no one who seeks God, he is talking about the volitional dimension of our being. Together these mean that things are so desperate that our state is actually hopeless unless God intervenes to do what needs to be done.