Asked to say what the Gospel is - the whole Gospel - how would we answer?
More especially, if we had spent half a lifetime preaching it, and wanted so to tell it that we met all the objections to it people raise, provided against all the misunderstandings of it we had met, and gave people who received it such a grasp of it they would never lose it ... and if we were anxious too to be totally honest about our own experience of living out its implications, claiming neither more nor less than was really true ... how would we answer?
The Epistle to the Romans is the answer one man gave - the Apostle Paul. That, when he wrote it, is what he set out to do. He did not think that he was doing anything more than remind the Christians in Rome of the Gospel they had already heard from others (he had not then himself been able to visit them). But he wanted, as he said himself (1:15), to "share the Gospel with you who live in Rome." When evangelists preached the Gospel in New Testament days, what you have in Romans is the kind of thing they preached. If we find it tough going, then the 'Gospel' we are used to hearing is a watered-down version of the real thing!
Martin Luther used to call Romans "the clearest Gospel of all." Certainly it was the part of the Bible that liberated him, and as a result let loose the extraordinary religious awakening we call the Reformation, which has gone on liberating men and women non-stop for nigh on five centuries.
Again and again, in times when their faith has grown weak and confused, it is to this book Christians have turned to take their bearings. In my own more limited experience it has done for me what it did for Luther - it has plunged me into the darkest night and led me out into the brightest day. More than any other book of the New Testament (except perhaps the book of Revelation - and that creates problems these days!), it supplies the bigness of vision which is vital if we are to grasp the fulness of the Gospel.
The widespread crisis of confidence in the Gospel's relevance to life in our modern technological age, with all its political, educational, social and moral problems, is in large measure due to a widespread failure to grasp the big facts of life as we have to live it in society before the face of God. We do not see life whole until we have seen the big over-arching truths of creation, of sin, wrath and judgment, of righteousness and reconciliation with God, of mercy and grace. The whole of our life is shaped by these things supremely: and until we get a hold of them - or rather, until they get a hold of us - life makes no sense. We should get to grips with our Gospel so we are not 'babes in our understanding' of it. There are too many Christians mature in years but immature in faith because they have never gotten off the bottle in their spiritual diet.
Let us look at the man Paul was, the task he faced, and the remedy he had.
When Paul wrote this letter, he was at the height of his powers. His third missionary venture was coming to an end, and following his return to Jerusalem with the 'Poor Fund' which he had been collecting in his travels, he meant to tackle the most ambitious journey of all: the journey to Rome and Spain ... to the furthest boundaries of the empire. I am of half a mind to believe, having read what the scholars say about his trial in Rome, that he did make it to Spain eventually, though that need not concern us now. I do not doubt he would have made it to Britain too if he had had half a chance - barbarous bunch of savages though the Brits were then!
It was, as he tells his friends in Rome in this letter (1:13), one of his life's ambitions - and at the time of writing the unanswered prayer of his life - to visit Rome with the Gospel. He little dreamed that when at last he did reach Rome, it would be as a prisoner in chains. His arrival there did not turn out at all as he had imagined it.
In Acts ch. 28, Luke tells us that when the Christians in Rome heard that Paul was coming, they went out as far as the Forum of Appias and the Three Taverns to meet him ... a little beyond the city's outskirts. A small company, they would have been able only to wave to him across the line of soldiers who escorted the prisoner's cart Paul and Luke were in together; the soldiers would not have allowed anyone closer than that to their prisoners. But "on seeing them," says Luke, "Paul thanked God and took courage."
Obviously he had been feeling down-hearted, and needed cheering up! This was not how he had dreamed of the big day - arriving as a prisoner in a cart with a bunch of common criminals, all sweat-soaked and ragged from their journey, and no-one on the streets to take any interest in them as they trundled by.
"Oh Lord," Paul might have said, as he bumped dejectedly along, "this isn't how I dreamed it. Nobody knows I'm here; and how - in these chains - shall I ever get Rome's ear for the Gospel?" And then there was this eager bunch of folk searching the cart across the line of marching soldiers for his face ... and waving to him, all smiles and bright eyes, and calling greetings. And Paul looked into his friend Luke's face, sitting opposite him there in the cart, and his eyes filled with tears as he dropped a shaking head between his knees to say "Thank you" to God, and felt better!
It is only a glimpse of him, this; but it gives us a clue to the kind of man Paul was. The man who wrote this letter was very human.
Poor Paul! How his image has suffered ... in part, because the severe and archaic language of the Authorised Version (especially in its rendering of the epistles) has conveyed - all innocently - a false impression of him as a stern, unbending, high-brow sort of man, (and a woman-hater into the bargain!), who was almost inhuman in his iron discipline and flaming zeal, who preached way above everybody's head, and who somehow did not belong in the workaday world of ordinary mortals.
He was not like that at all. He had his bad moments, as we all do, when he felt so depressed he did not see any way through. Once at least, he lost his cool with Barnabas over young John Mark ... and (as I believe) lived to regret it. He wept openly when he parted from his friends in Ephesus, and even though he could find it in him to sing in prison cells, he found them cold, damp, uncomfortable places, which made him beg young Timothy not to forget to bring his overcoat when he came to the prison to visit him there.
There was a delightful streak of mischief in his makeup too, which showed through the day he stirred the pot in the Jerusalem Council between the Pharisees and Sadducees to divert their anger from him.
And although, as we shall see, he experienced times of such overflowing joy that he could hardly find words to express it and turned to poetry to help him, he also knew what it was to feel the clammy fingers of fear and a terrible despair closing in on him. (II Cor. 1:8)
My own impression of him, after many years of living with his writings, is that he was a quite emotional man, rather as Winston Churchill was; not 'gushing' - in fact, he was naturally shy and diffident, even nervous, and in consequence expressed himself badly sometimes. (He admitted as much in a letter to Corinth. II Cor. 10:1, 10) But in those who knew him well he inspired a very deep affection, so that without ever asking them to, they suffered quite dreadful hardships to serve him, and were glad to do it. (Phil. 2:30)
This is the man who strove to set down in writing all that was most precious to him. It is an intense letter, because he was writing of those things that burned like a fire in his bones; for the sake of those passionate convictions, in fact, he was to lose his life in the city where he sent this statement of them. What he wrote in these chapters was for him the very stuff of life.
And it meant the world to him to send it - ahead of his arrival there - into the heart of Imperial Rome. He knew he had to preach the Gospel there ... and to Cæsar! He had known that as something settled and unalterable from the day of his conversion. God had chosen him, he learned that day, to "carry Christ's Name before Gentiles and kings."
When Paul wrote, "I want you to know, my brothers that I have often intended coming to you, so as to reap some harvest for the Gospel among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles," he was not being big-headed ... as though the Church in Rome would run off the rails if he, Paul, did not come and put them straight, or as though he wanted to bolster his reputation as a celebrity evangelist in the Empire's capital city. He had nothing on his mind but his 'orders' - to "bear the Gospel to Gentiles and kings." That is what God had said. Paul never ceased to entertain a sort of puzzled wonderment that he should have been chosen for it; but he knew he had. And it was inconceivable to him therefore that his writ should not run to Rome, the beating heart of the Gentile world, and to Cæsar, its earthly lord.
"Surely now ... at last ... by God's will, I shall succeed in coming to you," he writes (ch. 15), "and when I come, I know that I shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ." That is the note on which he ended this letter to them - a note of ringing confidence in the power of the Gospel.
But near the beginning of the letter, that confidence had wavered for a moment. Only for a moment ... but waver it did. In 1:15-16, Tertius, his secretary wrote at his dictation, "... so I am eager to preach the Gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the Gospel."
Not ashamed of it? What on earth put such a thought into his head at all?
Did Paul then sometimes feel about his faith as we do - embarrassed to confess it, afraid of mockery when he opened his mouth to tell it? To have to rebut the thought, he must have felt the force of it.
When did he feel it? The answer is supplied I think in v. 15: "... to preach the Gospel to you who are in Rome" - there!
In my imagination, I see Tertius leaning back and enjoying a rest from his furious attempts to keep up with Paul while Paul strode up and down the room musing with himself. To plant the Gospel there! What might it not achieve if it took root in that city, whose rule, whose trade, whose culture, whose influence spread like a great vine to the remotest corners of the world? Decisions taken in Rome directly affected the lives of Bedouins in the Arabian desert! Rome was the communications centre of the empire. Rome was the key to the world.
But then (as I imagine it) a shattering contrast struck him. On to the background of that splendid city, with its wealth and power and pride, the vast horizons of its government, its commerce and its armies, Paul flung the picture of himself preaching in it. And for a moment his spirit wavered.
He already knew - bitter experience had taught him - that to Jews the Gospel was an offence ... an offence that provoked them to vicious anger; and to the Greeks it was a joke ... a joke that provoked them to laughter. Would it make any better sense to Romans - hard-headed property tycoons, ruthless aggressors, men who had no time at all for anything they could not see or touch or manipulate with brute force or the power of money? How would they react to his tale of a crucified 'chippie' from the back of beyond? How else would the story of the Cross strike them but as a case of Rome's boot grinding yet another pest into the ground? How could he persuade them that that Cross was the unveiling of the heart of God? (How, for that matter, can we so persuade the political overlords of nations like China today?) To minds so steeped in materialism - a materialism reinforced by huge success - the Gospel would look so flimsy, so trivial, so absurd. For a moment, Paul anticipated the sting of scorn with which they would surely greet him.
But then he shook himself and looked again at Rome - at a side of it his mind had for a moment overlooked. His thoughts had played a trick on him. For a moment he had been hypnotised, as half the world was hypnotised, by the facade of Rome's imperial splendour. Now he made himself look behind that impressive mask to the vice-ridden squalor it concealed.
Rome might send her legions to the ends of the earth and fling her roads and her commerce after them; she might hold in her hands the reigns of political destiny over distant peoples; but to heal the victims of crime and vice with which her realm was infested, Rome was impotent (and Paul will sketch in that squalor). For them she could do nothing. All her strength and splendour was being eaten away from within. She was like a magnificent carcase, full of maggots. What hope was there for Rome but total collapse, unless God stepped in and brought to men and women as a gift from heaven that righteousness of life which alone can make it strong?
If Paul had that kind of answer to the 'sickness unto death' with which Rome was sick, then he could say, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes it ... be they Jew, Greek or Roman; for in it 'the righteousness of God is revealed for men's and women's faith.'"
I see Paul stirring from his reverie, and soon Tertius's stylus is furiously busy again. "Get all this down, Tertius - the sin, the sheer, downright wickedness in the world, and God's wrath with it ... they've got to see that. And God's righteousness - not the sort of righteousness that sits up in heaven like some stuffed dummy and hands down sentences on all us poor sinners, but that righteousness of God Himself that comes down out of heaven into the filth and squalor of the world and exerts its energies here to cleanse and heal and liberate it: the righteousness that isn't content just to be right, but has to put right what's gone so badly wrong. They've got to see that. Let's get busy, Tertius."
That righteousness, which makes life rich and wholesome and blithe and free, is what this letter is about. If in our heart there is a hunger and a thirst for it, a longing for life to be glad and good to its very core, filled with that "blessing from the Lord that maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it" - if we want that quality of wholesomeness, freedom and fulness in which it can be said of a man or a woman that truly they live at last - then let these studies be an invitation to pilgrimage.
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