Daily Devotion

Peace With God

“We have peace with God…”
Romans 5:1

It is sin that breeds the quarrel between us and God, creates not only a strangeness, but an enmity; the holy righteous God cannot in honour be at peace with a sinner while he continues under the guilt of sin. Justification takes away the guilt, and so makes way for peace. And such are the benignity and good-will of God to man that, immediately upon the removing of that obstacle, the peace is made. By faith we lay hold of God’s arm and of his strength, and so are at peace, Isa. 27:4- 5.

There is more in this peace than barely a cessation of enmity, there is friendship and loving-kindness, for God is either the worst enemy or the best friend. Abraham, being justified by faith, was called the friend of God (James 2:23), which was his honour, but not his peculiar honour: Christ has called his disciples friends, John 15:13-15. And surely a man needs no more to make him happy than to have God his friend! But this is through our Lord Jesus Christ—through him as the great peace-maker, the Mediator between God and man, that blessed Day’s-man that has laid his hand upon us both. Adam, in innocency, had peace with God immediately; there needed no such mediator. But to guilty sinful man it is a very dreadful thing to think of God out of Christ; for he is our peace, Eph. 2:14, not only the maker, but the matter and maintainer, of our peace, Col. 1:20.

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