But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.— Romans 5:8
Picture a city after a flood. Water covers the streets and fills the ground floors. A man paddles a rubber raft between rooftops, looking for something to drink. There is water in every direction, and none of it will keep him alive.
Many of us live close to that. Love fills our songs, films, novels, and feeds. We say the word all day. Yet the hunger to be loved fully, without conditions, rarely goes away.
Just before our verse, Paul makes a claim that speaks straight to that hunger: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). Then he takes up the question anyone would ask next. What kind of love is this, and how can we be sure it is real?
Paul answers by comparing three kinds of death, each harder to imagine than the one before.
The first is dying for a righteous person, someone who keeps the rules and treats people fairly. Paul says “one will scarcely die for a righteous person” (Rom. 5:7). We may respect such a person, but respect alone rarely carries anyone that far.
The second is dying for a good person, someone warm and generous who has shaped our lives. For someone like that, Paul says, perhaps one would dare to die. It does happen. Parents die for their children, friends for friends, soldiers for their country, and we honor them for it.
The third is the death Paul has been leading up to, and here the comparison breaks down. Christ died for the ungodly, for people whose whole lives were turned away from God, “while we were still sinners” (Rom. 5:8). No one would think of dying for people like that, yet Christ did.
Even at its best, human love gives itself for someone worth the cost, but God’s love went to people who had nothing to offer Him. When love is given to someone who has earned it, we call it a reward. When it is given to someone who has earned nothing, and has even turned against the giver, it is a gift beyond anything we could have asked for. Scripture’s word for that gift is grace, the grace the old hymn calls amazing. We are “justified by his grace as a gift” (Rom. 3:24).
Paul also writes in the present tense: God shows His love. The cross happened once, outside Jerusalem, on a day that could be marked on a calendar. God is still pointing to it. When we wonder whether we are loved, God points us back to the place where His Son died for us, a fact that does not rise and fall with our feelings.
That love does not stay outside us as a fact to admire from a distance. Paul says it has been poured into our hearts. His verb, ekkechytai (ἐκκέχυται), describes something poured out in the past that remains where it was poured. God did not measure out His love a little at a time, waiting to see whether we would earn more. What the Spirit poured into us is still there.
The love we know best keeps accounts. I loved him, so why doesn’t he love me back? Much of our hurt in relationships comes from that one question. God’s love never kept that kind of account. It began before we loved Him at all.
Most of us know what it is to be surrounded by talk of love and still feel dry. Paul answers that thirst with a death that really happened, for people who did not deserve it, and with a love the Spirit has poured into everyone who belongs to Christ.
In a world flooded with words about love, if we want to see a love that is real and does not change, we look at the cross. It has not changed on the days we feel empty. Grace means we stop trying to earn God’s love and start drawing on what He has already given.
God proved His love there once for all, and what He poured into us has not run dry.
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