Revelation makes it very clear as it speaks toward Jesus, the Lamb of God—it says that this very Lamb that came to be a sacrifice for you and me was slain before the foundations of the world—before Adam sinned, God provided a substitute.  Hallelujah!  Amen?  God isn’t trying to catch up on what the devil’s doing.  He’s already made a way.  He died for you before you were born.  While you were a sinner, and now through the indwelling Holy Spirit, the intimacy of God that’s come to us through regeneration, having been born again and God now taking up residence within us, Christ in us, the hope of glory.  Amen?  Aren’t you thankful for the assurance of your salvation?  Isn’t it tragic how many people are futilely searching after God?  A god of their making, a god in their likeness, and remain in bondage and under the power of sin, when the Scripture makes it clear that those who come to Him and receive this free gift now abide in Him, and He abides in us, praise God.  I just love John, Chapter 17, where we see God revealing to us that we are abiding in Christ, us abiding in the very Godhead itself, and God loves us, the Scripture says, just as He loves Jesus; amen?  What a great place to be.  And it’s by grace, Paul said in Ephesians, that we’re saved through faith and that not of us, not of works, lest any man should boast.

So, we see in this fifth chapter of Romans he makes this great statement that the natural mind has a lot of trouble grasping.  Verse 8 says, “…God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  If you don’t have it in your Bibles, mark these next two words, “Much more [much more, much more] then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.  For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more,”—there it is again—“being reconciled, we shall be saved”—how?—“by his life.”  Saved by His life.  So, we delight in that, and he comes back, and he talks about, then, where sin originated in humanity.  Sin originated first, as we all know, in the heart of Lucifer, this great archangel.  Some say that he was overseeing all of the praise and all of the worship in heaven.