Paul's
Priorities: Proclaiming the Good News. Romans 1:5-15
What
we see here is not only some of the key ideas that Paul is going to reinforce
and expand as he goes through this epistle but also we see something of his
priorities in terms of his own apostolic ministry. The trouble with priorities
is all of the little things that come up every day in terms of immediate
demands that interfere with our priorities. Priorities are designed for us to
establish what our scale of values are in terms of work, family, our
involvement in the local church; and then we live on the basis of those
priorities. The problem that everybody commonly experiences is that we live in
an era when everything is rushed. We can’t imagine what it must have been like
a hundred years ago and before that, and just think that from the time of the
creation up until the early eighteen hundreds nothing ever moved any faster
than a horse. Communication never moved any faster than a human being could
travel. Life proceeded at a really calm pace and nobody expected an instant
response to a letter; nobody was in a hurry. Yet today we send a message and
expect a reply within 30-45 seconds, and if we don’t we start getting a little
bit impatient. It just puts that time pressure on us so that the immediate
urgent things crowd out priorities, and the priorities are the things that at
the end of the week we say we really wish we had got A, B and C done but
instead all these other things got done except for the things that we really
wanted or needed to get done. All that does is build up a lot of anxiety and
tension.
In
the Christian life there are also priorities and those priorities we have to
pay attention to in terms of spiritual growth, and we see the indication of
what some of these priorities are in this opening introduction to the epistle
to the Romans.
Romans 1:4 NASB “who was
declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according
to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, [5] through whom…” So now
Paul is moving his statement forward that it is through this one who is
identified as the descendant of David, according to the flesh, and is also identified
as deity. The phrase “Son of God” is a Hebraism, an idiom in Hebrew indicating
a character, an attribute or a quality of somebody, and so this phrase is
indicating full deity. “Son of Man” is indicating true humanity. So He is
validated by God the Father as the Son of God (full deity) by the resurrection
from the dead. That is God’s seal of approval for what Christ did on the cross
paying for our sins. Through
Him “… we have received grace and
apostleship to bring about {the} obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for
His name’s sake.”
This raises some questions—especially
in main clause, “we have received grace and apostleship”—in trying to
understand exactly what that describes. Both nouns are used without an article
here and so we have to catch what the sense is. “We have received” is one verb,
the aorist passive of lambano
[lambanw], and
we have to ask who the “we” is. Is Paul talking about “we” meaning himself and
his audience? Have they received the grace and apostleship? No. So he is not
using the “we” to refer to himself and his audience, he is using it as he does
in several places like an editorial “we,” a royal “we.” Paul is just speaking
about himself in a plural form; he is talking about the fact that he received
grace and apostleship. But these two nouns should not be understood as being
dependent upon one another, they refer to two different aspects of what
occurred when Saul was on the way to Damascus to arrest and imprison the
Christians he would find there. When Jesus as the resurrected, glorified Lord
Jesus Christ appeared to him in a bright light, his companions hear a sound but
they can’t make out the specifics of what is said. They see the light as an
objective experience. Something happened; something objective took place that
was witnessed by those who were on the road with him who certainly weren’t
sympathetic to anything that was going on. Paul is confronted by the Lord Jesus
Christ. That is an act of grace. Grace means that those who are undeserving
receive something of blessing, of benefit, even though they don’t deserve it.
So Paul received grace there in that the Lord Jesus Christ personally appeared
to him, and it is in that revelation of Himself as the risen Messiah that Paul
responds by trusting in Him as his savior and accepting the fact that Jesus was
indeed the Messiah, as promised in the Old Testament.
That is the grace part. But in that
action that occurred the Lord Jesus Christ is identifying Paul’s mission; that
he is going to take the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. So his mission
as opposed to the mission of the other eleven is going to be oriented to the
Gentiles. So he receives two things. He receives grace in terms of salvation,
and salvation is always by grace, not by works (Ephesians 2:8, 9); it is the
free gift of God. And he receives apostleship in terms of a spiritual gift and
a mission. An apostleship is a mission for a particular task. That task is laid
out in the next phrase, “for obedience to the faith.” In the Greek this is a phrase
that begins with the preposition eis
[e)ij] which
always indicates a goal or direction in a phrase of this nature—eis plus the accusative of hupakouo [u(pakouw)], “obedience.”
There are lot of people who think that
whenever somebody comes along and starts emphasizing obedience to the Bible
that somehow that is legalism; but it is not. That is just a distortion of the
concept of legalism. Legalism has to do with an external as the basis for the
blessing of God: that if I do X, Y and Z then that is the cause of God blessing
me. What the Scripture teaches is that God imputes to us the perfect
righteousness of Christ—that is in every believer—and it is on the
basis of that perfect righteousness that God blesses us, not on the basis of
obedience. But on the basis of obedience what happens is we grow spiritually,
and as a result of that spiritual growth God then provides for us many of the
things that He has said or accrued to the believer as he grows in maturity and
has the capacity to enjoy those things. But it is not because of obedience as
the basis for blessing.
The phrase here, “for the obedience of
faith,” is understood different ways. The main noun is “obedience”, but that
noun is qualified by another noun that in this case is in the genitive case.
The genitive case usually indicates possession and translated by the English
preposition “of”—“obedience of the faith.” But that phrase “of the faith”
has many different shades of meaning. So there are some who say that it is “for
obedience from faith,” genitive of source, that obedience comes from the source
of your faith (and that is possible). Others say it is obedience belonging to
faith, in terms of the genitive of possession; others that it is obedience in
the sense of with reference to faith. So we want to see if we can narrow down
our understanding of what Paul is talking about when he talks about the
obedience of the faith.
The best way to understand that is to
go to Romans 16:26 NASB “but now is manifested, and by the
Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God,
has been made known to all the nations, {leading} to obedience of faith.” In
literature often there is often the situation where there is an introduction
and a conclusion and the main ideas are bracketed by repeating or focusing on a
similar phrase. That is what Paul has done here. By repeating the identical
phrase in his conclusion he helps us to understand what he means by it. That
phrase “by the Scriptures of the prophets” should remind us of Romans 1:2 NASB
“which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” He
picks up those same ideas: prophetic Scriptures in 1:2 and in 16:26. The end
result: “obedience to the faith.”
When
we look at this phrase, something else strikes us that doesn’t show
up in the English. That is that in terms of the Greek, three words: the
preposition eis, and two nouns.
But in English there is the insertion of an article, “the.” Paul only uses the
article in the Greek when he is identifying faith in terms of the body of
doctrine that is foundational to Christianity: Christian truth, Christian
doctrine—the Christian faith. So the inclusion of the article in English
is misleading because Paul is not talking about “the faith” that has been given
once for all to the saints, he is talking about the act of believing in what
God has revealed. This is evidenced by the lack of the article in both 1:5 and
16:26. It should be translated “for obedience of faith.” It has a measure of
ambiguity in the English. What Paul is talking about here is related to faith
in terms of belief in the message, and there is more than one message, more
than one commandment. The primary commandment is related to justification, what
we usually refer to as salvation: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will
be saved (Acts 16:31). “Believe” there is a command, an imperative. So the
gospel is really a command from God to man to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
and the result is that you will be saved. That is the first and most
significant command, the command of priority, that first of all we have to be
sure that we are justified before God.
The second aspect of faith has to do
with ongoing trust in God as we grow and mature in the Christian life. We need
to look at a significant passage for understanding what Paul is talking about
here when he expresses the fact that we have a message, as he states in 16:26,
“the commandment of the everlasting God.” The commandment comes via the Lord
Jesus Christ to the eleven disciples in Matthew 28:19 NASB “Go therefore
and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I
commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” In
the English this is translated as if the primary command is to go, and the
second command would be to make disciples of all the nations…teaching them.”
That is true as far as it goes. The first word to go is a participle, not an
imperative, and we will hear a lot of sermons also by people who say that the
main command is to make disciples and that first participle should be
understood as a temporal participle—when
you are going, i.e. as you go throughout the process of life, of living, make
disciples. However, the nuance in Greek is when you have an imperative that is
preceded by an adverbial participle it can be an adverbial participle of
command. The main verb is a command and that is like a magnet, and the
participle preceding it is like a bunch of iron filings that get attracted to
that magnet. So the meaning of that initial participle there, even though it is
not a strict imperative mood in the Greek, picks up an imperatival sense
because of its relationship to the main command. So it is correct to translate
this as an imperative. There is an imperatival command to the disciples because
they are to make disciples of all nations.
When
you are sitting in Jerusalem the only way you can make disciples of all nations
is to get up and leave Jerusalem. You can’t just sit there in Jerusalem and
think it is just going to happen. This was the disciples’ marching orders; they
were to go to all the nations and to make disciples. That word “disciple” is
the Greek word matheteuo [maqhteuw], which has
the idea of making students of people. It is not necessarily and end of itself,
it isn’t necessarily a word that means make them a Christian. Some disciples
are believers, some aren’t. Even amongst the followers of Jesus the term
“disciple” was not equivalent to someone who was a believer. The word
“disciple” was used in different senses. One was the generic sense of students
and listeners or those who were studying what a teacher was teaching; it didn’t
mean they believed him, but they were studying. Then there is another sense in
which as Jesus laid down principles: if you want to be a true and genuine
disciple of mine then you have to do all of these other things. Well you don’t
have to do anything to be saved so again that word disciple isn’t equivalent to
being saved, but it is indicative of those who want to go beyond simply making
sure they are going to end up in heaven; they want to advance in their
relationship with God and be genuine students of what God has revealed to us
and what He has to teach us. So that is the command. By the command to make
disciples Jesus is saying that their primary mission is to teach, to instruct.
That is the primary purpose of the apostolic ministry; that is the primary
purpose of the pastoral ministry. It isn’t the sole purpose but it is 90 per
cent, the focal point.
The
next two participles help to understand what is involved in making disciples.
Two things are involved. The first has to do with the participial form of baptizo [baptizw]
and
the second has to do with the participial form of didasko [didaskw]. baptizo means to baptize, to immerse. In
the early church the mode of baptism was immersion. Somewhere into the late
second and into the third century they started sprinkling infants because the
question came up: What happens if the baby dies? The idea was if they
identified them with their parents then they would go to heaven. After
Constantine legalized Christianity in the early fourth century and Christianity
became the official religion of the state the entry into the church became
identified with a person’s citizenship. So you would be considered a very poor
citizen, even a traitor, if you weren’t in the church, and the way to get into
the church was to be baptized. Baptism became equivalent to becoming a citizen
of the state and those two ideas became really muddied up and confused all the
way through the period of the Middle Ages and up into the period of the
Protestant Reformation. When the Protestant Reformation began with Martin
Luther and he challenged the works-oriented theology of the Roman Catholic
church, he was focusing on one thing: justification by faith alone. That became
the major battleground, and he really didn’t go much beyond that because he
didn’t have time. He never left the concept of splitting the church from the
state; neither did John Calvin, Zwingli, and others. But Zwingli had some
students who, as they were carrying out the foundational principle of the
Protestant Reformation—the Scripture alone—and study the Scripture,
applying a literal interpretation, they came to this word “baptism.” They
looked it up in their Greek lexicon and saw that it meant to immerse and also
that it seemed to be something that was done at the beginning of a person’s
Christian life, after they had trusted in Christ as savior. It was a picture to
teach something about the spiritual baptism when a believer is identified with
Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. This was a major heresy and they
were tried, convicted and drowned. From that birthing point there was the rise
of a group called Anabaptists. The word means being baptized again. They had
all been baptized as infants.
The
other thing about baptism is that though the literal meaning of the word is to
immerse its significance is something else. It was a way of identifying
something with something else. Baptism as a believer has to do with
identification and Paul makes the significance of it clear in Romans chapter
six; that the spiritual truth is that when a person believes in Jesus at that
instant they are legally identified with Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection
so that the tyranny of the sin nature is broken and they are put in a new
position in Christ. Baptism is always associated with a person’s conversion,
their initial faith in Christ and their justification. So the phrase “baptizing
them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” relates to
justification or what we refer to as phase one salvation.
The
second participle “teaching”: they are made disciples first by baptizing,
identifying them with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and ‘teaching
them to observe all things that I have commanded.” That relates to the ongoing
growth of the believer and how he learns the Word, and he is to observe all
that Jesus commanded us. Once again we get back to that concept of obedience.
So
Paul concludes Romans in 16:26 by saying: “…Scriptures of the prophets,
according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the
nations, {leading} to obedience of faith.” This means that obedience consists
of faith, the obedience to believe and the obedience to grow is also produced
by faith. Faith has to do with obedience. This is seen again in Romans 10:16 17
NASB “However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says,
“LORD,
WHO HAS BELIEVED OUR REPORT?” So faith {comes} from hearing,
and hearing by the word of Christ.” This is dealing with Old Testament passages
and the failure of Israel to accept Jesus as Messiah. Paul quotes from and Old
Testament passage and connects what was happening at that time with what had
happened in the period 700-586 BC. In Isaiah 53:1 Isaiah says:
“Who has believed our message (report)?” But it is the first sentence in Romans
10:16 that we focus on: “they did not all heed the good news (obeyed the
gospel).” Believing the message is equivalent to obeying the gospel. The report
is the message of the gospel. So faith is obedience, but it is not a
meritorious obedience which is somehow the idea of working or doing something
righteous that God somehow blesses us for; it is recognizing that the merit is
all in Christ, not in me; God has commanded me to believe in Him but the value
comes from the object of belief, not the act of belief.
We
recognize then that when Paul says, “through whom we have received grace and
apostleship”, apostleship, the focus of apostleship, is to carry out the great
commission of Matthew 28:19, 20. That is the mission of the apostles—to
teach the gospel, the command to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will
be saved (Acts 16:31), and then the mandates related to the spiritual life that
come after salvation. The apostles were commanded to take that message to all
the nations. This is exactly what Paul said in Romans 1:5. The words “for His
name” is indicating the character and reputation of Him. If you do something in
the name of someone it is in reference to their authority, their character,
their person. It is not just this nominalistic idea that a name is just a
label. The name in Scripture has something to do with the essence or character
of a person, and it is with reference to the identity, the character and the
person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Galatians 2:20 NASB “I have been
crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live [no longer a slave to
himself], but Christ lives in me; and the {life} which I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” So
the life of the person after salvation, after he becomes a believer, is a life
that is based upon faith. It is faith in the Word of God and faith in the
principles and mandates of the Word of God.
Romans 1:6 NASB “among whom
you also are the called of Jesus Christ.” The word “called” is one of those
words that often crops up on the so-called Calvinist-Arminian debate. The word
“calling” has a basic meaning of an invitation. Matthew 22:14 NASB
“For many are called, but few {are} chosen.” In the process of the parable
Jesus said: [2] “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a
wedding feast for his son. [3] And he sent out his slaves to call those who had
been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come.” See the
connection between calling and inviting. That is what calling refers to; it is
everybody who is invited to the wedding. [4] “Again he sent out other slaves
saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner;
my oxen and my fattened livestock are {all} butchered and everything is ready;
come to the wedding feast.” That is the call. Verse 14 says many are called;
that is the invitation. Few are chosen; chosen has to do with those who
responded to the invitation. These are the ones who are referred to then as the
called. We might say in English that 100 people were invited, 20 people showed
up; they are the invitees, and we refer to them as the called. That doesn’t mean
nobody else got the calling; it just means nobody else responded to the
calling. That is how Paul is
applying to these believers in Rome.
Romans
1:7 NASB “to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called
{as} saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ.” The word “as” or “to be” has been added to translations, it is not in
the original. The word for “saint” in the Greek is the word hagios [a(gioj)]
and
it means something that is set apart. A
saint is someone who has been set apart for the service of God. We are all
called saints because we are set apart for Christ by means of the baptism of
the Holy Spirit. Every believer is a saint, set apart to God. Grace is the
Greek word charis [xarij] which
is not the word that was normally used, the typical word that was used was chairein [xairein], and he shifts it to grace
because he is emphasizing grace comes from God. He joins that with the Greek
word eirene [e)irhnh] which
comes from
the Hebrew word shalom and relates to
the Hebrew greeting. He combines the two in his greeting, emphasizing that
grace comes only from the source of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, and peace
comes only from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This becomes the
unique way of addressing his letters.