After showing how Jesus is forming a new covenant family of people from all nations, Paul goes on to claim that these people are the new humanity that fulfills God’s promises to ancient Israel by obeying the Torah in the power of the Spirit.
Paul begins by exploring how Jesus’ family is a new kind of humanity (Rom. 5). He looks back at the first human character in the biblical story, Adam, whose name means “humanity.” Adam and all humanity have chosen sin and selfishness, and as a consequence, they face God’s judgment. They’ve become enslaved to sin’s influence, resulting in death. Paul then contrasts Adam with Jesus, the “new Adam,” a human who lived in faithful obedience to God through his act of sacrificial love. Jesus offers his life as a gift to others so that they can be justified before God. And now Jesus stands as the head of a new humanity that is being transformed by the very same gift.
This leads right into chapter 6, where Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that choosing to follow Jesus means leaving their old Adam-like humanity behind and entering into the new Jesus-style humanity. And the sacred physical symbol of that transition was the immersion of their baptism. Their old humanity died with Jesus as they entered the water, but their new humanity was raised with him from the dead as they came up out of the water. When a person trusts in Jesus, their life is joined to his, and what’s true of him becomes true of them. It’s when people accept their identity as new Jesus-like humans that they are liberated to become wholehearted people who can love God and their neighbor.
Now, if creating this new humanity was always God’s purpose, then, Paul asks in chapter 7, what was the point of God giving Israel the law, or, in Hebrew, the Torah? Paul says that the commands in the Torah were good and showed God’s will for how Israel should live. However, if you read the storyline of the Torah, Israel broke all of its commands.
The more laws Israel received, the more they replayed the sin of Adam in rebellion. Even when God gave the people specific rules to obey, it didn’t fix the problem of the sinful human heart. So, paradoxically, the laws of the Torah made Israel even more guilty. But Paul says that paradox was the very point. God’s goal was to make it crystal clear that evil had hijacked the human heart, and the Torah, as good as it was, couldn’t do a thing about it.
In chapter 8, however, Paul says that the solution has arrived through Jesus and the Spirit. The commands of the Torah had acted like a magnifying glass, focusing the problem of the human condition in one place, Israel. But now Israel’s representative, Jesus the Messiah, has paid for and dealt with all that sin through his death and resurrection. He has released his Spirit into his new family to transform their hearts so that they can truly fulfill the ultimate call of all of the Torah’s commands—to love God and neighbor. God’s renewal of human beings is the first step in his larger mission to rescue and renew all creation, making it into a place where his love gets the final word.
While chapters 1-8 explain how God’s eternal purpose was fulfilled through Jesus, we’re still left with the question of the status of the Israelites who don’t acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah. How does this story fulfill God’s ancient promises to them?
