1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5 Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to faith and obedience for his name's sake. 6 And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
7 To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Dig Deeper
People who live in the United States of America have grown up with the unique prospect of being part of a country where the philosophical idea of the country is as important as the physical aspect. Being an American means something more than just being a physical citizen. You can act “American” or act “un-American.” That is something that is pretty unique around the world. You don’t hear of someone thinking “Canadian” or being “un-Brazilian.” We talk quite a bit, in our country, of that philosophical idea. We are quick to mark ourselves out as real Americans while castigating our ideological opponents as un-American. Yet, with all of that being talked of so much, very few Americans really seem to know their history and what the ideals of the founding fathers really were. They talk much of being American but very few truly understand what that means. For instance, I heard someone on the news the other day claiming that it is un-American to have so many people without free healthcare. The fact is, this was a well-meaning person who has little clue of what being American as an ideal meant to the founders of the country.
In a similar manner, Christians talk constantly of the gospel. We preach the gospel, we talk of living out the gospel, we read the gospel, we share the gospel, and we charge some people with perverting the gospel. We talk about it constantly, but if you ask twenty different Christians what the gospel is, you’re likely to get twenty different answers. It is a curious thing, I suppose, that Christians are a group of people that purport to live and embrace the gospel but so few have a firm grasp on what it actually is. Many Christians will point to Paul’s declaration in Romans 1:16 that the gospel is the power of God to bring salvation but in that verse Paul describes the effect of the gospel rather than defining it. So, what is the gospel? This is exactly what Paul lays out as he opens what is perhaps his most epic letter of all, the book to the church in Rome.
One thing that can be easily overlooked with the letter to the Romans is that it is indeed a letter. Because of its sweeping rhetoric and soaring theology, Romans is often viewed as a detached presentation of Paul’s theology of salvation, but it is nothing of the kind. Of course Paul does deal with that topic, among others in this letter, but we lose much of the intended thrust of Romans if we fail to see that just like 1 Corinthians or Galatians, it is a letter written to a specific church at a specific time dealing with a specific issue. Romans is not a clinical statement of Paul’s salvation theology, detached from a particular situation. An issue had arisen in Rome, and Paul is going to deal with that issue with the same sort of pastoral care and theological explanation that he uses in most of his letters so that his recipients can read the letter and determine the correct course of action for themselves.
Under the emperor Claudius in AD 49, most Jews had been expelled from Rome (cf. Acts 18:1-2). This apparently left the young church in Rome without any Jewish influence for five years. With Caludius’ death in AD 54, Nero became emperor and the decree expelling the Jews ended. This allowed Jews, including Jewish Christians, to return to the city of Rome. This meant that the church was suddenly dealing with the return of many Jewish Christians, which had apparently created some very difficult issues. There was clearly some tension that had developed between the Gentile Christians and the Jewish Christians, with some Gentile Christians possibly claiming that Jews had been so thoroughly cut off as the people of God that it made little sense to even to continue to try to evangelize them with the Gospel. This raised not only the difficult situations that Paul addresses in this letter, but even more foundationally, it raised the underlying question that Paul seeks to answer throughout this letter. If so many Jews are rejecting the gospel and God had promised to deal with the problems of sin, death, and separation from God through the one family of Abraham’s descendants, Israel, then how can God be considered faithful to his covenant promises? In other words, if God had promised to bring blessing and healing to the world through the one family of Abraham, has God failed to be faithful to the covenant by working another plan? This is the question that Paul will tackle in, perhaps, his most profound letter, and in doing so will deal, at the same time, with the specific issues that were rocking the church in Rome.
Paul lets his readers know from the outset that this book will be primarily about the gospel. But, for Paul, the gospel was not so much a system of salvation or a religious program, rather it was an announcement. In fact, the word “gospel” in Rome usually had to do with some announcement or proclamation declaring a mighty act or a special occasion concerning Caesar or some other important figure. Paul’s gospel is a pronouncement that claims the entire world for the true ruler, Jesus Christ, rather than Caesar. It is the announcement that God had promised throughout the Scriptures going back to the Fall of man. In Genesis 3:15, God promised a solution to the problem of sin through the seed or single family of a woman. This promise was given to Abraham, the promise that God would restore his creation and bring blessing to the whole world through his descendants, this single family.
This idea of the single family is why Paul is careful to specifically point out the important aspect of Jesus being an earthly descendant of David. He was the Christ, the Messiah, who in Jewish thought was the anointed king of Israel that would become the ruler of the whole world (see Ps. 72:8-11; 89:27; Isa. 11:1-4). He is the slave (the true meaning and full-force of the word translated “servant”) that is making the announcement of the gospel just as Caesar would have a slave announce his gospel. But the gospel of the Messiah is the true good news (the meaning of the word “gospel”).
Jesus was both the Messiah and God’s Son, a term that was intimately linked in Jewish thought with being in the image of God. He came as the earthly descendant of David but he was declared to be the Son of God, the one in the true image of God, by the power of his resurrection from the dead. It was this incredible occurrence that reversed the verdict that any first century Jew would have passed on a would-be Messiah that suffered death at the hands of the pagan Romans. Any claimant to be a Messiah would be dismissed as a pretender to the Jew who thought that he was God’s son, the true Messiah (see 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2:7). But the resurrection changed all of that. It reversed that verdict. He was raised by the power of God through the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 6:14; 15:24, 43; 2 Cor. 13:4; Eph. 1:19-20; Phil. 3:10) showing him to be the true Messiah, the true son of God, the true king of the world.
This was all, of course, quite bold and even dangerous to declare such things in Rome, Caesar’s city. These were the same Caesars who claimed to be the sons of God, the rulers of the world. How could a dead Messiah be seen as a rival to anything so powerful and obvious? It was through the resurrection. Jesus walked into death and out the other side. Jesus had smashed the power of death, the ultimate weapon against human beings who had been trapped by sin. Jesus’ defeat of death had changed everything. This gospel was not just a new religious system of salvation but the very announcement of this victory over death.
It is “through him”, by which Paul refers to the act of dying to self and entering into the life of the Messiah (see Rom. 6:1-14), that Paul has received his call to apostleship. It is that same grace and that same life that offers the opportunity for all people including Gentiles to come into obedience to God. With that, Paul has summed up the meaning of the gospel. It is a pronouncement of Christ’s defeat over death and the call to obedience to belong to him. It is in the resurrection and in this call to belong to the Messiah, to be part of God’s holy people, that God has shown, as Paul will demonstrate, himself to be faithful to his covenant. He promised to bless the world through Abraham’s single family, and in Christ he has done this. The resurrection changed everything. It is the gospel. It is the declaration that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, that he, as the Davidic Messiah, has defeated death, and that, most importantly from Paul’s perspective, God has shown himself to be trustworthy and faithful to his covenant. Paul hasn’t explained in detail yet how that can all be true in the single act of the resurrection, but he will take the rest of his letter to do just that. He will vindicate God by redefining the people of God around the crucified and risen Messiah.
Devotional Thought
The gospel is, in effect, the powerful declaration that Jesus is the king of the world, demonstrated to be such by his resurrection. Paul believed himself to be a slave, called to proclaim that announcement to the world. Have you realized a similar calling in your life? Are you as dedicated as Paul was to making that public announcement of the gospel?
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