There is hardly a more systematic document in the Bible than Paul's letter to the Romans, which makes the study of it at the same time easy and demanding. It is easy enough to see how he arranges his arguments; it is the following the arguments themselves which is demanding because Paul compressed his thoughts into the tightest fit words could give them.
The first seventeen verses of Romans are a general introduction to the whole epistle - a prologue, so to speak. In it Paul speaks of three things:
The Gospel and the Resurrection verses 3 and 4
The Gospel and God's power verse 16
The Gospel and Faith-righteousness verse 17
THE GOSPEL AND THE RESURRECTION
The Gospel is God's Gospel, Paul says; v. 1: he was set apart "for the Gospel of God." There is only one Gospel, and it is God's. So we cannot tinker with it or make changes to it to render it more agreeable to modern man or more palatable to our own taste.
God the Father produced it; it is copyright to Him. It is from God we have to get it, no-one else - and that is as true for those who preach it as for those who hear it. If we do not like it, then we must take our quarrel with it to God.
It is from God Paul got it, as he never tired of saying; and when people believe it, it is God they believe, as he never tired of saying either.
The reason we may be sure that it is God's alone is because it is about Jesus whom God raised from the dead.
It is the Gospel, says Paul in v. 3, "concerning God's Son." If somebody says they are telling us the Gospel, and what they are telling us is not about Jesus, they are fooling us. They may be fooling themselves as well. Much preaching passes for Gospel preaching that is not Gospel preaching at all. It is all about the world and how wicked it is; or about us and how guilty or how needy we are; or about hell and how threatening it is, and heaven and how desirable it is; or about the future and how frightening it is; or about life and how hard it is and how prayer helps you cope. The Gospel is highly relevant to all these things, of course; but they are not what it is about. It is about Jesus: Who He is, what He did and why God gave Him to us.
i. First, it is about Jesus "Who was descended from David according to the flesh" - that is to say, He was a real flesh and blood man who was born and lived and died as we all do. He was born of our race at a real time in a real place in the real history of our race. He had a family tree like everyone else. He was not "a cuckoo in the nest of humanity"; * He really is one of us.
ii. Second, it is about Jesus "Who was designated (clearly marked out as being) Son of God by the mighty act in which He was raised from the dead in the power of God's Holy Spirit" - that is to say, He is divine; He is the same as God; He and God really are one.
Both things are absolutely vital. For when He gave us the Lord Jesus, God was building a bridge across the gulf that separates us all from Him. If Jesus was not a real man, the bridge never got built - it did not reach our side: and if He was not really God, the bridge never got built from God's side. Only if He is both - true man and true God - can He join us both together.
iii. Third, the proof that He was both is His resurrection.
To be raised from the dead, He had first really to die; and He could not have died if He was not a real man. But if He really was raised from the dead - and getting up out of your grave is a thing that simply does not happen - then there is no explanation of it except that He was raised up by the power of God. Nothing else can account for it. But if it was God Who raised Jesus, then God 'certified Him' thereby. By raising Jesus from the dead God was saying, "He is all that I am. Death cannot have Him."
And Paul was not in any doubt that Jesus was risen.
He had not believed it once. In fact his disbelief in the resurrection had been fanatical - even venomous. And then Paul met Him, risen! As he was riding into Damascus a light surprised him "above the brightness of the sun" ... at noon? ... outside Damascus? Such a light had to be supernatural. And the voice that spoke to him out of that light said, "I am Jesus." Just that ... the man Jesus; but clearly divine. Never again was Paul in any doubt that Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified in shame and disgrace outside Jerusalem, was the risen, divine Son, clothed in the heavenly glory of God the Father.
That meant that the truth Jesus brought into the world by His teaching, His living, His dying and His rising was 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' direct from God. Because God raised Jesus from the dead we can be absolutely sure that the Gospel is true.
We are told we cannot be sure of anything, that it is presumptuous of Christians to claim they have the final truth. What about other religions? Are they not just as likely to be true? But no matter how scorned or reviled we are for saying it, we have to say, "No: Jesus is the truth; not because we think so, but because God raised Him." God did not raise Buddha; He did not raise Mohammed; He did not raise Krishna: He raised Jesus. He raised only Jesus; and by that I know that Jesus is the truth. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is 'Gospel truth'. **
THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD
The Gospel is God's saving power for every one who has faith.
On the face of it, the Gospel does not look a very powerful thing. Is it not just a story? Where is the element of power - let alone the power of God - in a mere story? In fact Paul knew from his own experience of preaching it just how weak a thing the Gospel did appear to be in human eyes.
This tale of a crucified carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee struck Greeks as a joke. When Paul told them that the very heart of God was unveiled in the events of Christ's crucifixion, it had them in stitches.
And to Jews, it was worse than a joke, it was a radical offence. To claim that the heart of God was unveiled in the death of a man whom God allowed to come to such a disgraceful end - by Jewish decision and by the profane hands of Gentile 'dogs' - was blasphemous. To have let him die like that, God had clearly adjudged the man Jesus to have been a scoundrel. The crucifixion told you nothing about God except that He had rejected Jesus and flung him on the scrap-heap.
What other conclusion can indeed be drawn from the story ... unless the sequel of the resurrection be true? If Jesus died and that was the end of Him, then the Greeks and the Jews were right: the story of Jesus is a sick joke. But if His resurrection three days later really happened, then it is not a joke any more.
Yet if God did that for Jesus, why did He let Him die? God would have raised Jesus only if something was done in His life - in the whole of it, including the way He died - that He fully supported and wholly endorsed. So what had they been doing together in the Cross, Jesus and God?
It is when the answer to that question dawned on Paul as he wrestled with the scriptures of the Old Testament under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that he came to understand what a mighty power had been exerted by God in both the dying and the rising of the Lord Jesus. Paul saw that in the Cross of His Son, God Himself had stooped beneath the enormous burden of mankind's sin - all the sin of all the world of all the ages - and made that burden His own burden so as to lift it - and the curse of it - off us. There was put forth there in the whole 'Christ Event' a power of God that simply staggered belief.
The power of sin had been vanquished ... in
a human life.
The curse of sin had been lifted ... by an action of God in the human
life of the man Christ Jesus.
The iron grip of death on our race had been broken ... in a human
life.
As Paul put it to the Corinthians, "As by a man came death, so by a
man has come also the resurrection of the dead." {I Cor
15:21}
The mightiest and blackest forces in the entire creation had all been undone in the very realm of human life where we have to reckon with them. A power had been exerted in life that set us all free.
The magnitude of God's accomplishment in Christ was so mind-boggling that it left Paul spluttering on the edge of incoherence for the rest of his life trying to find language to describe it.
In the risen-Lord-Who-had-been-crucified there was a power available to us through that Man, and from that Man. He prayed for his friends in Ephesus that they might "know what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe - the same divine energy which God exerted in Christ Jesus when He raised Him from the dead, and exalted Him to the very throne of heaven where authority and control over everything is in His hands." (Eph. 1:19)
The power Paul prayed that they should see in the resurrection is more than a power simply to do a physical miracle, as though it were some sort of merely scientific energy God had exercised, reversing the death process in a human body. For Paul, the power present in Christ's resurrection was worlds removed from that. It was death as the final manifestation of the power of sin in the world that God had reversed in Jesus. It was not a scientific power that had been demonstrated, but a moral and spiritual energy that was the match of all evil. Some sort of scientific power may well have been wrapped up in it; but it was merely incidental to the far, far greater moral and spiritual accomplishment of the Cross and the Resurrection.
The Gospel is God's effectual power in the world of men to deliver them from the power of sin and all its crippling issue - not least His own wrath in the final judgment - and restore us to the glory He created us as His creatures and His children to enjoy.
The one great stroke had been struck that broke the age-long chains that had hitherto fettered and bound our race, and set it free. It was like the arrival of the Allied Armies at the gates of the concentration camps, Auschwitz, Belsen and Dachau, at the end of World War II: the prisoners could all come out now. A sick and sorry lot we might all well be, as those prisoners were; but now at last the medicine, the food and the care can be given that will restore us all.
Now in some way, this power of God becomes effective in us through faith. But in what way?
THE GOSPEL AND FAITH-RIGHTEOUSNESS
Now we are at the point about faith in v. 17. "In it (the Gospel)," says Paul "the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'"
Here is an example of Paul compressing his thoughts into the tightest fit words can give them. What does he mean by the phrase 'through faith for faith'? Does the phrase belong with the word 'revealed' - God's righteousness is revealed through faith for faith? - or does it belong with the word 'righteousness' - righteousness itself is through faith for faith?
If it goes with the word 'revealed', does Paul then mean that without faith you cannot perceive the righteousness of God so as to have any confidence in it? ... "God's righteousness is revealed through faith for faith." Or does he mean that the faith of the Gospel's preacher is as important as the faith of his hearers? - the righteousness of God is, in the Gospel, revealed through faith (the preacher's) for faith (the hearer's).
If on the other hand, the phrase belongs with the word 'righteousness' (the more likely alternative ***), does Paul then mean that faith is the necessary condition that has to be met for the Gospel to become a force in our lives?
We generally take it for granted that Paul means just that. But if we do, we shall be left with such a misunderstanding about the nature and the place of faith as will lead us up a blind alley. We are here at a point where it is vital that we not misunderstand what Paul means, or we shall go on misunderstanding everything he later says about faith (and he says a great deal); we can in fact take him to mean exactly the opposite of what he intends, and get it all wrong. And if we get what he says about faith all wrong, we shall get the Gospel all wrong, and it will not work. We shall end up disillusioned.
That faith is the condition on which the Gospel becomes effective is quite false. But we generally do so understand it. In the Gospel, we say, God meets a man with His message of salvation; but everything depends on how the man responds to it. If he responds with faith, it will work; if he doesn't, it won't. But that is neither what Paul says nor what he means; he is not here apportioning to God and to men the contribution each must make to salvation: you do your bit and God will do His bit, sort of thing.
For Paul faith is not a quality which a person must bring to the Gospel before it can become a power in their life. Rather the fact that a person has faith is the evidence that the Gospel has already worked!
It is not our faith that gives the Gospel its power; it is the power of the Gospel that gives us faith. The faith of the Gospel is not the way to become righteous; rather the faith of the Gospel is that righteousness.
The way it is frequently misunderstood is this:
"We don't have the ability to keep God's law; we are too far gone in sin for that. So there is no way we can make ourselves acceptable to God. But then along comes God with the Gospel. With the Gospel, we get three things. The first is forgiveness for our sins, so we can make a fresh start. The second is the gift of the Holy Spirit, so we have a new power in our lives we didn't have before. And the third is faith, by which we 'tap in' to that power of the Spirit in our lives. Now - being forgiven and having the Spirit and faith - we can keep the Law, so we at last become really righteous."
But that whole view of it is the very thing Paul is concerned to tear out root and branch. That way of looking at it means that the only way you can become righteous is by keeping the law of God; the only difference the Gospel makes is to give you help to do it that you did not have before.
But that is not what the Gospel is about. We do not get to be righteous at all by keeping the Law of God. With or without the Gospel, with or without the Holy Spirit, with or without faith, we cannot become righteous that way - ever. We get to be righteous only through faith. Faith is the word that describes the living relationship we have with God, the God of the Gospel. That is what makes us righteous - the relationship, not our performance.
Faith is not the way to be righteous; it is righteousness; and it is the Gospel that gives us the faith that is righteousness.
"He who through faith is righteous shall live." That is Paul's whole thesis. It is his whole Gospel.
*As in Cambridge I once heard Bishop John Robinson aver "is a necessary consequence of Him being born of a virgin" ... his point being that if the male sperm leading to His conception was 'unnatural' He was denied half His true human heritage - was not truly human; which leads one to ask of the first human male, "Was he then not truly human?"
** Curiously, when Paul says in v. 4: 'by the resurrection of the dead,' he uses the plural ... 'of the dead' meaning many, not the singular (meaning only the one man Christ Jesus). Whenever Paul thought of our Lord's resurrection, he had in the back of his mind that the resurrection was not a thing just for Jesus by Himself - it would lead to the resurrection of all who believed in Him. The resurrection, marvellous as it was, was but a 'firstfruits.'
*** See C. E. B. Cranfield, 'Romans Vol. 1', I.C.C., T & T Clark, 1975, p. 99 ƒƒ
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