<p>5:8&nbsp;<i>God commends His own love toward us</i>- The Greek translated &ldquo;commend&rdquo; means to set down beside, in contrast to, over against. And it&rsquo;s in the continuous tense. God keeps on doing this. But what is His love so continually laid down against? Surely against our sins and failures. But it keeps on being commended through the fact that Christ died for us, whilst we were still sinners. Christ died once only, and so the continual commendation of this fact is in that continually, we perceive the wonder of it all. Our unrighteousness commends God&rsquo;s righteousness (Rom. 3:8).&nbsp;</p><p><i>In that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us</i>- This shows the greatest example in the cosmos of taking the initiative, of seeking to save others when there is no appreciation from them&nbsp;<i>at the time</i>&nbsp;of what you are doing. This is an endless inspiration in child rearing, preaching and pastoral work. Tragically, the simple words &quot;Christ died for us&quot; (Rom. 5:8) have been grossly misunderstood as meaning that Christ died instead of us.&nbsp;There are a number of connections between Romans 5 and 1 Cor. 15 (e.g. v. 12 = 1 Cor. 15:21;&nbsp;v. 17 = 1 Cor. 15:22).&nbsp;&quot;Christ died for&nbsp;<i>us</i>&quot; (Rom. 5:8) is matched by &quot;Christ died for our&nbsp;<i>sins</i>&quot; (1 Cor. 15:3).&nbsp;His death was in order to make a way whereby we can gain forgiveness of our sins;&nbsp;it was in this sense that &quot;Christ died for us&quot;.&nbsp;The word &quot;for&quot; does not necessarily mean 'instead of';&nbsp;Christ died &quot;for (because of) our sins&quot;, not 'instead of' them.&nbsp;Because of this, Christ can &quot;make intercession&quot; for us (Heb. 7:25) - not 'instead of' us.&nbsp; Neither does &quot;for&quot; mean 'instead of' in Heb. 10:12 and Gal. 1:4. If Christ died &lsquo;instead of us&rsquo; there would be no need to carry His cross, as He bids us. And there would be no sense in being baptized into His death and resurrection, willingly identifying ourselves with Him as our victorious representative.&nbsp;</p>