Romans 1.1-7

The apostles’ goal

Romans 1.1-7

If you know our church at all, you know that our habit is to preach through books of the Bible: we start at chapter 1, verse 1, of a book and just work our way through, week after week. We believe that’s the best way to preach the Bible faithfully, because we can’t skip over things that are difficult or inconvenient for us, and we always learn the texts in their proper contexts, to not force meanings on the Bible’s words that it never intended to communicate.

That said, we are excited to begin this new school year with what John Piper called “the Greatest Letter Ever Written”—Paul’s letter to the Romans.

When my grandmother died a couple of years ago, me and my cousins and my aunts and uncles spent several days going through her possessions (my grandfather died about ten years earlier). Inevitably we found some really cool things—I found an old hat that belonged to my great-grandfather; I found lots of old photos; and I found letters and journal entries to and from my grandmother.

I loved going through those things; it was fascinating, and it was emotional.

But never in all of that treasure-hunting, never in all the letters I read, did I think any of those letters had anything to do with me. It was interesting, but it had no impact whatsoever on my life today.

If we’re not careful, we can come to the letters we find in the Bible in the same way: they’re interesting, sure, but they were written a very long time ago to people none of us knew.

But there are two major differences between my grandma’s letters and the letters of the apostles that we find in the New Testament.

The first is that the New Testament letters are inspired by the Holy Spirit of God—God himself, speaking to us through human writers. My grandma was a wonderful woman, but her letters were not breathed out by God.

The other difference is the goal. The apostles fulfilled their ministry—which included these letters they wrote to the churches and to other ministers—with a specific goal in mind. And that’s what we’re going to see today.

I’d like you to open your Bibles to the book of Romans, chapter 1. We’re going to spend our time today in verses 1 to 7, and then we’ll make our way through the entire book, week after week, for the next year and a half or so, more or less. We won’t go nine years, like Piper did, but even so: buckle up. We’re in for a long ride.

But today we’re going to spend some time just setting the scene, talking about what was going on at the time Paul wrote this, and most importantly, what his goal was.

Author: Paul

So first of all: if you look at v. 1 of chapter 1, you’ll see a name: Paul. This was the way one began a letter at the time—he didn’t sign it at the end, “From, Paul,” or “Love, Paul,” but rather began by saying who he was.

This letter was written by the apostle Paul. Almost no serious scholar denies that Paul is the author of this letter; this is one of the books that has consensus nearly across the board. He probably wrote this letter from Corinth somewhere between A.D. 55 and 57.

Context/Purpose

We’ll get into Paul’s story in a little bit, but first, let’s look at what was going on at the time, at why Paul may have written this letter.

Here’s what we know, both from the Bible and from what we know about Rome at this period in time. In the Old Testament, we see God choose a people for himself, who will be his chosen people—the people of Israel, the Jews. And that’s how it is for a long, long time.

But we have hints ahead of time, through the prophets, that it won’t always be that way.

Then Jesus arrives on the scene. He preaches to the Jews, and dies, and is raised from the dead, and he sends his Jewish disciples out to “make disciples of all nations”—not just all Jews. That’s the first surprising thing.

The Holy Spirit comes and gives the disciples—now called apostles (“apostle” means “sent”)—the power to do just that. Suddenly men and women from outside of the Jewish people begin hearing the good news of Christ preached in their own languages: the gospel goes out to all people. And Paul is one of these apostles who is preaching the gospel (we’ll say more about his story in a minute).

Now at this point, it’s a little more than twenty years since the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The Christian church is gaining traction all over the Roman empire; churches are being planted all over the place, and more and more people are converting to this new religion (which, as we’ll see in the coming weeks, isn’t really new at all).

This same thing, of course, is happening in the city of Rome itself.

We know that the apostle Paul didn’t plant this church; he likely doesn’t know anyone there personally. He’s hoping to go there soon, on his way to Spain, but first he needs to go to Jerusalem to deliver money that he had collected for that church (cf. Rom. 15.19-32, Acts 19.21). Paul likely sent this letter to the church in Rome in the care of a certain Phoebe, whom we’ll meet at the end of the book, as a way of introducing himself and his ministry, so that they would support him in his work in Spain.

We also know that this church was composed of both Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. There were other churches with this kind of makeup at the time, but it seems that this church was more mixed than usual, because talks about this a lot. The church is a healthy church, as Paul will say—they are doing well—but they are faced with a number of particular challenges…which of course give call the perfect opportunity to talk about why the gospel is such good news.

At the root of their particular challenges was their multicultural nature. The Roman church was more than likely a Jewish church at first: Jews were converted to Christianity, and began meeting in homes, and more and more people joined them, until finally, they had a church. And of course, because this was Rome and it was mostly Gentiles around, Gentiles began to come to faith in Christ as well, and joined the church.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Around A.D. 49, the emperor Claudius exiled the Jews from Rome, because of strife stemming from Christianity (we see as much in Acts 18.2). So all the Jews had to leave. But the Gentile Christians were able to stay and keep the church going during that time.

So for around five years, the church in Rome was likely an exclusively Gentile church. But then, when Claudius died in A.D. 54, the Jews were allowed to return to Rome. So suddenly these Jewish Christians were thrust back together with the Gentile Christians who had been running the church in their absence, and significant questions about how to do things arose—mostly questions about how to live together as Christians who were both Jewish and non-Jewish.

This is why Paul needs to spend so much time expounding the Old Testament in Romans: he’s helping these Jewish believers and non-Jewish believers understand the backbone of their faith. As Thomas Schreiner (who wrote one of the commentaries I’m using for this series) wrote: “The issues raised by the Old Testament and the place of the Jews in God’s plan were crucial for the entire community.”

So there was a mix of religious and cultural backgrounds in the church; there also would have been a very sharp socio-economic mix. In the church in Rome, you would have everyone from high-ranking Roman officials, all the way down to slaves. (Imagine a church today in which the prime minister came to church alongside homeless refugees who came in off the street. That’s what was it would have been like.)

All of these factors make for a lot of questions. Can we be in good standing with God by obeying the Law of Moses? What does the salvation of Gentiles mean for the future of the Jews as God’s people? Should the Gentiles observe the Law of Moses like the Jewish Christians do?

Paul treats all of these questions and many more; he uses them as a springboard to expose the essential elements of the gospel he preaches. In other words, by addressing all of these questions, he also addresses the big question, the essential question of the Bible, which is quite simply: How does a just God save a sinful people? This is the question the church devoted nearly the first four hundred years of its existence to answering. And Romans is probably the place in the Bible where the answer is given most fully.

The Gospel (v. 1-4)

So with that background in mind, let’s begin at v. 1. (Quick note: if you’re a grammar nerd like me, and you’re reading in English, this is going to be frustrating. V. 1-6 are one fantastically long sentence, so we’re going to be looking at several bits without ever getting a fully complete sentence. That was Paul’s style of writing, and it makes for some very dense sentences with a lot to parse through. You’ve been warned.)

First, the greeting:

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God…

So who was Paul?

First, we see that he was

a servant of Christ Jesus…

This word “servant” literally means “slave,” and while it doesn’t necessarily contain the negative connotations we imagine in that word (for there were many types of slaves at the time, many of them voluntary and temporary), it does imply a committed engagement to service. When Paul says that he is a servant of Christ Jesus, he means that this is his entire life. This is who he is.

Next, we see that he was

called to be an apostle…

The Romans would likely have already heard about Paul, but his story would have been no less incredible for that. He was well known amongst Jewish Christians, because he started off as one of their chief persecutors. Paul was educated by the great Jewish teacher Gamaliel—it’s like going to the most prestigious school in your field, in the whole world. He was a Pharisee: that is, he was one of the people who took the Law of Moses seriously. As we see in his letter to the Philippians, Paul was the best of the best.

And the expression of this zeal came out in persecution of those Jews who were converting to Christianity. In Acts 7, we see Paul (called Saul at this point in Acts) holding the coats of the people who kill the first Christian martyr, Stephen. And in the beginning of Acts 8, Luke tells us that Paul was ravaging the church, putting Christians in prison left and right.

Now we can tend to be really hard on people like pre-conversion Paul—they had the Scriptures and still they got it all wrong!

But put yourself in their shoes. They are Jews, recipients of their people’s history. And from their perspective, they see what’s going on around them, and they get really worried, because they’ve seen this before. What they saw happening, in their minds, is called syncretism: it’s a mixing of one system of beliefs with another.

And they know how this sort of thing has played out in the past. We went through the book of Micah last spring: what did we see there? The people were mixing in idolatrous practices with their worship of the one true God, so how does God respond? He condemns them to exile in Babylon. Paul and the other Pharisees were not about to let something like that happen again: if someone was mixing the worship of God with another belief system, it needed to be stopped. Immediately.

The thing is, what they thought was happening wasn’t really happening. The gospel of Christ wasn’t a new, wholly different thing; rather, it was the fulfillment of the Jewish faith. That’s what we see when Jesus appears to Paul in Acts 9: a light shines around Paul and he falls to the ground, and he hears a voice from heaven, saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Not, “why are you persecuting Christians”, or “these Jewish syncretists.”

Me. Why are you persecuting me?

So Paul is radically converted to faith in Christ, he is taught by Christ himself what he is to preach, and he is sent by Christ to do it—to bring the gospel to the Gentiles.

So it’s important to note that while Paul affirms his authority to preach to the Romans by calling himself an apostle, it’s not his own authority he’s affirming, but Christ’s. He’s not arrogant, just honest: “Christ sent me to say these things to you.”

After this: he was

set apart for the gospel of God, 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures…

The word “gospel” simply means “good news”. It is a fairly ordinary word in Greek. But what makes this “good news” peculiar is that it’s not new. It’s not a surprise—or at least it shouldn’t be. Paul says that God told his people very far in advance that this good news was coming (though they may have been a little hazy on the details of how it would work). And this is one reason he’s going to spend so much time quoting and referencing the Old Testament in this letter: to show the Jews, “When you read the Old Testament, this is what it’s saying. I’m not replacing old Scripture with new Scripture; I’m showing you why the old Scripture is not only true, but fulfilled now that Christ has come.”

So what is this “gospel” for which Paul was set apart, this “gospel” that God had promised beforehand through the prophets?

It is the gospel (v. 3)

3 concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…

This is a very loaded section, so we’ll need to take some time here.

The first thing we need to note is that “the gospel” is “concerning the Son of God,” Jesus Christ. If you don’t have Jesus, you don’t have the good news.

Now, it doesn’t seem all that necessary to say that, because most churches that call themselves Christian talk about Jesus. The question is, what do they mean when they talk about Jesus?

In many churches, it will be Jesus as self-improvement tool: you go to Jesus in order for him to “fix” you. (Essentially, take any self-help book off the shelf at Fnac, slap Jesus’s name on it, along with some vague, biblical-sounding language, and you’d have pretty much the same thing.)

Or it will be Jesus as medicine man: you're sick, and someone told you that Jesus can make you better—no treatment, no medication, just have faith, and you’re cured.

Or it will be Jesus as cheerleader: he loves you, and he’s in the stands with his painted cardboard sign that says, “GO [insert name here] GO!”, and when you’re around him you’ve got an incredible boost of energy and confidence because Jesus says you’re awesome, and Jesus doesn’t lie.

The problem is that none of these “Jesuses” is the Jesus of the Bible. Sure, Jesus is encouraging; and yes, we do see him heal many people; and yes, there is so much wisdom in his teaching that even unbelievers admit that they can be greatly improved by following (at least most of) what he says.

But to limit Jesus to any, or even all, of these things, means creating a fictitious character out of our imaginations. It means ignoring everything he came to do.

So who is the Jesus of the Bible? Who is the “Son of God”?

First we see that he was “descended from David according to the flesh.” The Holy Spirit made a young woman named Mary miraculously pregnant; she was a virgin, engaged to a man named Joseph. She and Joseph were married, and Joseph was Jesus’s (adopted, earthly) father.

That’s a big deal, because Joseph was a descendant of King David, the greatest ruler Israel had ever had; and there are multiple promises in the Old Testament that one day, God would send another, better King, to save his people, and that this ultimate King would come from David’s line.

The second thing we see is that he was “declared to be the Son of God in power” (v. 4). The “power” he’s talking about is the power which raised Jesus from the dead (and Paul will get to that in just a minute). But we shouldn’t understand that before Jesus was raised, he was an ordinary man, and after his resurrection he somehow became the Son of God.

This is a term of proof. It is a term of proclamation. At Jesus’s resurrection, Schreiner writes, Jesus was “enthroned as the Messianic king, descended from the line of David”.

Now this gets a bit tricky. Paul says that Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead. There is a parallel structure to v. 3-4: we have “according to the flesh” in v. 3, and “according to the Spirit of holiness” in v. 4.

What he’s saying is that Jesus’s resurrection marks the beginning of a new era, which is characterized by the work of the Holy Spirit in the church, to spread the gospel to all corners of the world. The contrast between “flesh” and “Spirit” in these verses is a mark of progression—not the progression of Jesus’s dignity or value, but simply of time. Schreiner writes, “During Jesus’s life on earth as the Son of David, he lived his life in the old age of the flesh that was characterized by weakness, sin, and death. At his resurrection, however, Jesus left the old age behind and inaugurated the new age of the Spirit… The resurrection of Jesus indicates, therefore, that God has begun to fulfill his promises to Israel. The saving promises made to the nation have become a reality in and through the true Israel, Jesus the Messiah.”

That’s why Paul says this. He’s saying that all the promises of God to his people in the Old Testament…they’re beginning to come true.

So this is a very specific “Jesus” Paul is referring to here—the real Jesus Christ, the Son of God, promised beforehand by the prophets and proven legitimate by his resurrection from the dead, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is the Jesus we’re talking about when we talk about the gospel.

The Apostolic Call (v. 5-6)

Next, Paul continues his introduction of himself by affirming his authority as an apostle (along with the other apostles). He says, Jesus Christ our Lord (v. 5),

through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, 6 including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ…

It’s really important to see that Paul (and the other apostles) uniformly frame it this way: they are not superhuman. They are not geniuses or superheroes. They have received grace from God, just like anyone else, and they have received apostleship. Literally, this means they were sent by Christ to communicate a message.

And this message has a very specific goal: to bring about the obedience of faith.

Now the meaning of this term is disputed a little—it only appears twice in the whole Bible: once here, and once at the end of the letter, like a bookend. Two possibilities have been proposed. The first is that he’s referring to obedience that comes from faith. In other words, faith doesn’t come as a result of obedience, but rather obedience comes from faith.

The other possibility is that he’s talking about the obedience that is faith: there is no true faith without obedience. Obedience is the chief way of positively identifying someone who has faith.

The most likely meaning of this term is actually both of these at the same time.

Paul is a master synthesizer: there is no need to choose between one and the other, because of course both are true. There is no obedience without faith—it is a gift from God—and there is no true faith without obedience.

The apostles have been commissioned to share the gospel that will produce this effect: faith, which leads to obedience, which proves the existence of faith.

But what’s the goal? Is it just to create a league of well-behaved pod-people who do and say the right thing? No. This obedience of faith that the gospel produces is

for the sake of his name…

In other words, when you obey because of faith, other people will see it, and what they see when they see your obedience is not you, but him. In the Bible, the “name” of someone denotes their character and being. If you do something for the sake of Christ’s name, that means you do it in order to focus everyone’s attention on Christ.

And lastly, what is the scope of this message, which produces the obedience of faith, for the sake of his name? The scope is global. V. 5:

among all the nations, 6 including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ…

So this good news, and all it produces, is not limited to one people group (the Jews or the Gentiles) or to one socio-economic group (the poor or the rich) or one social class (the “important” people or the “unimportant” people). It’s for everyone.

This gospel is for everyone.

The Greeting (v. 7)

Paul ends this weighty introduction with a greeting to the church in Rome itself. V. 7:

To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints...

So this is how we know to whom the letter was addressed: to all the Christians in Rome. But he phrases this in a really unique way. He adopts language which was previously used for God’s chosen people of Israel.

Just one example of many. The prophet Zephaniah wrote, in Zephaniah 3.17:

17  The Lord your God is in your midst,

a mighty one who will save;

he will rejoice over you with gladness;

he will quiet you by his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing.

The people of Israel were God’s chosen people—the people he loved. The people he sang over. The people he longed for. In the Psalms and the Proverbs, in the Song of Songs, all over the prophets, God declares his love for his people.

Because he loved his people, he saved his people.

And because he has saved them, now they are called to live like him. They are called to be saints. Leviticus 11.45:

45 For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.

So you can see what Paul is doing here. He’s using these same terms, previously addressed to the people of Israel, and applying them to the Romans. This love, and this call to be holy, are now yours as well. You are loved by God. And you are called to be saints.

And on that basis, he says, to all of you,

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It’s a formal blessing, addressed to them from God, through Paul. Paul has already established that Jesus Christ is the true Israel, through his resurrection from the dead. All of God’s promises to Israel have begun to be fulfilled in him. And now the blessings of the people of Israel—grace and peace with God—have been made available to anyone who is in Christ.

Conclusion

Like I said, all of this is introduction. But I hope you can already start to see why this letter will be pertinent for us. We, like the church in Rome, are a church in the heart of the city which is, in more ways than one, the center of life in France. We are also in an area that is literally in the center of Paris (look at a métro map: nearly all roads lead to Châtelet-Les Halles).

We have a unique context in which to participate in the mission of God in this world.

But to do that, we have to keep our eyes firmly set on what is essential.

Let me conclude with a couple of points we’ll need to keep in mind as we continue in this series.

Firstly: the gospel is about Jesus Christ. You’ll have a lot of questions as we move through this letter, but there is only one essential question, and that is this: How can a just God save sinners? I said it at the beginning: this is the question the church spent the first four hundred years of its existence trying to answer; this is the essential question of the gospel.

And the answer is found in the gospel. The gospel isn’t a self-help manual. It’s not an invitation to a better life. It is the good news of the life, death and resurrection of the Son of God for God’s people.

Secondly: the gospel is for everyone. Another important question that we see Paul wrestle with in this letter is this: How can a God who has promised faithfulness to one people—Israel—save people from outside of Israel? We’ll get to the answer to that question in the course of time, but for the moment, we content ourselves with knowing that however God did it, he did it. He sent the apostles to preach the gospel, to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among ALL THE NATIONS. The gospel is for everyone.

Thirdly (and some of you really need to hear this): God really, truly does love you. Part of the reason why this is hard to believe is because if we’re not careful, our insistance that God saves us for his glory, in faithfulness to his promises, can lend a certain formalness to the relationship. We can think, “God saved me because he said he would…but he’s probably not very happy about it.”

Thank God that his love for us doesn’t depend on how we feel. Our feelings about our own lives and our own faith change absolutely nothing about what is true.

Here’s what is true: if you have placed your faith in Christ, you now belong to his people. And that means that the love God has for his chosen people has been directed specifically to you.

So please hear this, no matter who you are, no matter how you feel about your own faith today, no matter the doubts you might have about your own ability to make good on the commitment you made at your baptism: you are loved by God. And it’s not a quiet love. It’s not love because he has to. It is full-on, expressive, jumping-for-joy love that God has for you: the love he sings about in Zephaniah 3.17.

That’s the language the Bible uses to talk about God’s people. Paul uses it here to talk about those in Rome who received faith in Christ—and we have received the same faith.

This means, friends, that no matter how you might feel, you are loved by God. The same love he declared for his people, he declares for you. The same song he sang for his people, he sings for you.

Lastly: Because God loves you, he calls you to be saints. We shouldn’t see this as a daunting chore we have to undertake: this call to be saints is a gift. To be holy as God is holy is what all of us want, even if we don’t realize it. We are tired of pursuing things that don’t satisfy us; we are tired of longing after things that will disappoint us. We are tired of scrabbling around in the dark, hoping to stumble on something solid we can lean on.

Whether we know it or not, all of us want to be free to love what we ought to love, to do what we ought to do, to see things as they are, and to walk on solid ground, knowing exactly where we should go.

If we have been called to be saints by faith in Christ, we have that. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in us; he changes us, little by little, to see the world as we should, and to go where it is safe, and to love that which satisfies.

This is us, because we are in him.

So I can say to you all, with perfect confidence (because it doesn’t come from me, but from God himself):

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.