Romans 1:14-17

14 I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. 15 That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.

16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, [c] just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."


Dig Deeper
I spent nearly a decade coaching high school basketball at an inner city high school in Milwaukee, WI. We had some down years and some up years, including a season where we won our conference championship and went all the way to the state championship game. Yet, that is not the season that sticks out the most to me. The most memorable season for me as a coach was my third year coaching. I had a team of wonderful but spectacularly untalented young men. Not only did we finish the season with zero wins in nineteen games, we did not have so much as one game that we lost by less than ten points. Many people, looking from the perspective of wins and losses would surely have thought of that team as a miserable failure and something to be quite ashamed of. But they would be wrong. That was the best year I spent in coaching and if I had to live through one season all over again, it would be that one. We may not have won any games but that was never my ultimate goal as a coach. I was interested in building character in young men that would change their lives and serve them well throughout the rest of their lives. We were able to accomplish that in every season to varying degrees but never more so than that winless season. From the outside people might expect shame or embarrassment over that season, but I am not ashamed of it because that season, in the reality of everything that matters and is lasting, was the most effective and successful season that I ever had as a coach.

It would have been easy for the wise and powerful in Paul’s day to look at his gospel and find it something to be ashamed of. He was clearly losing in the ways that mattered to them. There was no prestige, no wealth, no power in this gospel that was connected to a failed Messiah that was put to death in a backwater part of the Roman empire. This gospel could not possibly stand up to the gospel, the good news, that Caesar was the savior of the world and would bring peace to the earth. In a head-to-head comparison, Paul’s gospel was a loser, from a worldly Roman perspective, and he should be ashamed. Yet, he was exactly the opposite and Paul wanted to make that clear. He hadn’t been avoiding Rome because it was such a difficult place to pronounce his gospel over and against Caesar’s gospel. He relished the opportunity and couldn’t wait to come there to show that his gospel was truly superior in all the ways that mattered. It may have appeared on the surface that Caesar was winning in this battle of good news, but Paul knew that Caesar was only the parody of the true King of the world.

Paul clearly felt that he had a calling in life from which he could not escape and did not want to. He had been called by God to be an apostle, a messenger of the gospel and a witness of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He knew from the outset (see Acts 9) that he would have to suffer for the sake of the gospel. And he knew just as clearly that he was called to be the apostle to the Gentiles (Rom 11:13) but that did not mean to the exclusion of the Jews, his own countrymen. He was obligated not just to God to preach the gospel but he felt that he was obligated to all men as well. This was an important detail for a church that was struggling with finding a common identity in Christ. There was no haves and have-nots, no insiders and outsiders in Paul’s gospel, and he was eager to come to Rome to preach that unifying gospel in a church that could be encouraged in the face of the current struggles and divisions they were facing. Paul’s purposes are not just evangelistic, though, he wants to preach the gospel to the Christians in Rome as well, by which he means the ongoing work of discipleship and building the kingdom that is built on the foundation of initially entering into Christ.

Paul continues here to explain why he wants to come to Rome as well as laying out the impact that his gospel described in the first six verses of this chapter. He has preached the gospel long enough to know that the announcement of the good news itself contained a power from God and the Holy Spirit that could not be denied. In the gospel, God was claiming the world as his own through the power of the resurrected Messiah. It has a power all its own that comes from God. This power brings about the salvation that the Jewish Scriptures had long promised. We tend to reduce salvation to something that happens to our souls when we die, but Paul meant much more than that. Salvation in the Old Testament had to do with the rescue of Israel from pagan oppression. In Paul’s mind, the real oppressors were sin and death, so salvation includes the rescue of God’s people from those twin tyrants that will climax in the rescue and restoration of the entire creation (cf. Rom 8). There is only one savior of the world in Paul’s gospel and Caesar is not it. Caesar cannot bring true peace, true justice, true salvation. Only the resurrected Christ has that power.

The proper response to this proclamation that the tyrants of sin and death had been dealt a death blow is faith. Faith in Paul’s mind usually has to do with surrendering of one’s will to God’s will, thus faith is not just something you think, but also something you do. It is believing obedience. Faith, though, is not something that we do in the sense of earning our position. It is the proper response and accepting the gift that God has offered in his gospel announcement. This powerful gospel that demanded the obedience of all true Israelites had another shocking aspect to it. It destroyed the barrier between Jew and Gentiles. Paul only alludes to it here, but will go on to make clear in the rest of the letter, the law could not accomplish the ultimate fulfillment of the one family that God had promised Abraham. Only in Christ had that dividing barrier been torn down.

Verses 16 and 17 really provide a summary of Paul’s entire thesis for the book of Romans but verse 17 makes clear that, despite a long history of people thinking otherwise, the book of Romans is not primarily about people and their individual salvation but about God and his righteousness. But what does it mean that in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed? Going as far back as Genesis 3:15, God had promised that he would fix the problems of sin and death through a single family. He passed that promise directly to Abraham and his descendants which eventually became Israel. Israel had held tightly onto that promise that God would work through them as that single family but they had messed something up badly. Rather than having the proper understanding of the single plan through Israel to restore the world, Israel had switched things around a bit and come up with a single plan for Israel apart from the world. The cure, Israel, had become part of the disease. So the Messiah came as Israel’s true representative. He was the true Israel, as Paul will work out in detail in chapters 9-11.

It is through the Messiah that God’s righteousness is revealed. This might seem confusing if we hold incorrectly to the meaning of righteousness, as many people do, as meaning some sort of superior moral standard. We must be careful not to read our own meaning of “righteous” into these texts even if it has been popular since at least the time of the reformation to do so. “Righteous” and it’s various offshoots do not refer to a moral status but to covenant faithfulness. Through the resurrection of Christ and the declaration that he is the heir to the promise of the single family through whom the world would be blessed, God has shown himself to be faithful to the Covenant. When people open up their hearts in belief to the true gospel, they will see that God has kept true to his promises all along. The gospel reveals a covenantal faithfulness that is “by faith from first to last,” a sentence that reads more literally “from faithfulness to faithfulness.” by this Paul likely means that when the gospel is announced, it is revealed that God has been faithful to the covenant and when this truth is received, it is our faith that answers to the revelation of the gospel. When humans respond in faith by entering into Christ, they are entering into the faithfulness that God has made available in the gospel through the Messiah.

Paul sums all of this up by quoting from Habakkuk 2:4. The natural question that occurs is why. To answer that we must quickly consider the context of the passage in Habkkuk. Israel is surrounded by her enemies who are marching against Israel and the natural question is why is God allowing this to happen to his people? This is matter of God’s faithfulness to his covenant. How can he be faithful to his covenant by allowing this to happen? Why would Paul relate that to the announcement of the gospel? Because the announcement to the gospel and the fact that Gentiles were streaming into God’s family, and Jews were not doing so in nearly the numbers that Gentiles were, brought up a special question of God’s faithfulness. If he had promised to bring healing to the world through Israel, then how could he be seen as faithful if the Gentiles were now receiving the kingdom? Habakkuk’s answer to the question of God’s faithfulness was that true people of God will live by faith that God will eventually punish their enemies. In the same way, the answer to this problem of God’s faithfulness will be revealed by understanding that his true people are those who live by faith. Paul doesn’t work that all out here, he only hints at with his quotation from Habakkuk but he will work that all out beginning in chapters 3 and 4. For now, he is content to announce that God’s faithfulness is declared in the resurrection of the Messiah. We will have to go through the rest of the letter to find out how.


Devotional Thought
Paul boldly declared that he was not ashamed by the gospel even though it may have seemed that the gospel was not strong and that the kingdom of God would be swallowed up the rival kingdoms of the world. Can you say the same thing about yourself? Are you convinced that the kingdom is powerful and that God’s justice will be revealed despite the seeming strength of the world? More importantly, do you act that way?