The Message of Romans

God's Good News For The World

John Stott

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781783590520
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Paul's letter to the young church in Rome has dramatically influenced Christians through the ages. It has been described as a 'gateway into heaven'.In this letter Paul gives a complete picture of the gospel - the fullest and grandest in the New Testament. His horizons are vast, taking in time and eternity, the past, present and future of humanity, and the great themes of justification, sanctification and glorification.This is the most personally rooted of John Stott's expositions, for he confesses to have re-encountered Paul's letter constantly throughout his Christian life. At the same time, her interacts with other commentators, some of whom are challenging interpretations that are time-honoured and traditional. He sees Romans as a Christian manifesto for our increasingly unstable world, emphasising the good news of freedom through Jesus Christ. Paul's vision of this freedom is astonishing. It overcomes ethnic conflict, the darkness of moral guilt, condemnation from God and alienation from others. It is a freedom to serve God and our neighbours in love.

Romans 1:1–6

1. Paul and the gospel

Letter-writing conventions vary from culture to culture. Our modern way is to address our correspondent first (‘Dear Joan’) and to identify ourselves only at the end (‘Yours sincerely, John’). In the ancient world, however, the custom was to reverse the order, the writer announcing himself or herself first and the correspondent next (‘John to Joan, greetings!’). Paul normally followed the convention of his day, but here he deviates from it by giving a much more elaborate description of himself than usual, in relation to the gospel. The reason is probably that he did not found the church in Rome. Nor has he yet visited it. He feels the need, therefore, to establish his credentials as an apostle and to summarize his gospel. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, he begins.

‘Servant’ is doulos and should really be translated ‘slave’. In the Old Testament there was an honourable succession of individual Israelites, beginning with Moses and Joshua, who called themselves Yahweh’s ‘servants’ or ‘slaves’ (e.g. ‘Truly I am your servant, Lord’),1 while Yahweh also designated Israel collectively ‘my servant’.2 In the New Testament, however, it is remarkable how easily the title ‘Lord’ has been transferred from Yahweh to Jesus (e.g. verses 4, 7), while the Lord’s ‘servants’ are no longer Israel, but all his people, irrespective of whether they are Jews or Gentiles.

‘Apostle’, on the other hand, was a distinctively Christian name from the beginning, in that Jesus himself chose it as his designation of the Twelve,3 and Paul claimed to have been added to their number.4 The distinctive qualifications of the apostles were that they were directly and personally called and commissioned by Jesus, that they were eyewitnesses of the historical Jesus, at least (and specially) of his resurrection,5 and that they were sent out by him to preach with his authority. The New Testament apostle thus resembled both the Old Testament prophet, who was ‘called’ and ‘sent’ by Yahweh to speak in his name, and the šālîaḥ of rabbinic Judaism, who was ‘an authorized representative or delegate, legally empowered to act (within prescribed limits) on behalf of his principal’.6 It is against this double background that the apostle’s authoritative teaching role is to be understood.

Paul’s twofold designation as ‘slave’ and ‘apostle’ is particularly striking when these words are contrasted with one another. First, ‘slave’ is a title of great humility; it expressed Paul’s sense of personal insignificance, without rights of his own, having been purchased to belong to Christ. ‘Apostle’, on the other hand, was a title of great authority; it expressed his sense of official privilege and dignity by reason of his appointment by Jesus Christ. Second, ‘slave’ is a general Christian word (every disciple looks to Jesus Christ as Lord), whereas ‘apostle’ is a special title (reserved for the Twelve and Paul and perhaps one or two others such as James). As an apostle, he had been set apart for the gospel of God.

How did Paul intend his readers to understand his reference to having been set apart? The verb aphōrismenos has the same root meaning as ‘Pharisee’ (pharisaios). Was this deliberate, since Paul had been a Pharisee?7 Anders Nygren, for example, reflecting his Lutheran tradition, writes that

as a Pharisee Paul had set himself apart for the law, but now God had set him apart for . . . the gospel . . . Thus in the very first verse of this epistle we encounter the letter’s basic juxtaposition of law and gospel which, from one point of view, is the theme of Romans.8

It is questionable, however, whether Paul’s readers would have picked up this play on words. In his own mind Paul is more likely to have seen a parallel between his consecration to be an apostle and Jeremiah’s to be a prophet. For in Galatians Paul wrote that God had set him apart (using the same word) from birth, and then called him to preach Christ to the Gentiles,9 just as God had said to Jeremiah: ‘before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’10 We need, therefore, to think of Paul’s Damascus road encounter with Christ not only as his conversion but as his commissioning to be an apostle (egō apostellō se, ‘I send you’, ‘I make you an apostle’),11 and especially to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

Paul’s two verbal expressions, then, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, belong inseparably together. We cannot think of ‘apostle’ without thinking of ‘gospel’, and vice versa. As an apostle, it was Paul’s responsibility to receive, formulate, defend, maintain and proclaim the gospel, and so combine the roles of trustee, advocate and herald. As Professor Cranfield has put it, the apostle’s function was ‘to serve the gospel by an authoritative and normative proclamation of it’.12

Paul now proceeds to give a six-point analysis of the gospel, to which he has been set apart.

1. The origin of the gospel is God

‘God is the most important word in this epistle,’ Dr Leon Morris has written. ‘Romans is a book about God. No topic is treated with anything like the frequency of God. Everything Paul touches in this letter he relates to God . . . There is nothing like it elsewhere.’13 So the Christian good news is the gospel of God. The apostles did not invent it; it was revealed and entrusted to them by God.

This is still the first and most basic conviction which underlies all authentic evangelism. What we have to share with others is neither a collection of human speculations, nor one more religion to add to the rest, nor really a religion at all. It is rather the gospel of God, God’s own good news for a lost world. Without this conviction, evangelism is emptied of its content, purpose and drive.

2. The attestation of the gospel is Scripture

The gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures (2). That is to say, although God revealed the gospel to the apostles, it did not come to them as something completely new, because he had already promised it through his prophets in Old Testament Scripture. There is, in fact, an essential continuity between the Old Testament and the New. Jesus himself was quite clear that the Scriptures bore witness to him, that he was the son of man of Daniel 7 and the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, and that, as it had been written, he had to suffer in order to enter into his glory.14 In Acts we hear Peter quoting the Old Testament in reference to Jesus’ resurrection, exaltation and gift of the Spirit.15 We also watch Paul reasoning with people out of the Scriptures that the Christ must suffer and rise, and that he was Jesus.16 He similarly insisted that it was ‘according to the Scriptures’ that Christ both died for our sins and was raised on the third day.17 In this way both the Law and the Prophets pointed to the truth of the gospel (3:21; cf. 1:17).

We have reason, then, to be thankful that the gospel of God has a double confirmation, namely the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New. Both bear witness to Jesus Christ, and this is what Paul comes to next.

3. The substance of the gospel is Jesus Christ

If we bring verses 1 and 3 together, by skipping the aside of verse 2, we are left with the statement that Paul was set apart for the gospel of God regarding his Son. For the gospel of God is ‘the gospel of his Son’ (9). God’s good news is about Jesus. As Luther put it in his comment on this verse: ‘Here the door is thrown open wide for the understanding of Holy Scripture, that is, that everything must be understood in relation to Christ.’18 Calvin writes similarly that ‘the whole gospel is contained in Christ’. Therefore, ‘to move even a step from Christ means to withdraw oneself from the gospel’.19

Paul now describes him by two contrasting clauses: who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David (3), 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 (4). Here are references, direct or indirect, to the birth (descended from David), death (presupposed by his resurrection), resurrection from the dead, and reign (on David’s throne) of Jesus Christ. The parallels here are so neatly and carefully constructed that many scholars have guessed that Paul is making use of a fragment from an early creed. If so, he now gives it his apostolic endorsement. It expresses the contrast between two titles (seed of David and Son of God), between two verbs (he ‘was a descendant of David’, but was appointed God’s Son) and between two qualifying clauses (kata sarka, ‘according to flesh’, and kata pneuma hagiōsynēs, literally, ‘according to spirit of holiness’).

First, the two titles. ‘Son of David’ was a universally recognized title for the Messiah.20 So was ‘Son of God’, based particularly on Psalm 2:7. The way Jesus himself understood it, however, as seen both in his personal approach to God as ‘Abba, Father’ and in referring to himself absolutely as ‘the Son’,21 already indicates that the designation is divine, not merely messianic. Paul evidently used it like this – not only in 1:3–4 and 9, but also, for example, in 5:10 and 8:3, 32. The two titles together speak, therefore, of his humanity and his deity.

Of the two verbs, the first causes little difficulty. It evidently refers to Jesus’ descent from David by birth (and maybe by adoption too, since Joseph acknowledged him as his son). The second verb, however, raises a problem. The translation appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead is easy enough to understand. But the trouble is that the New Testament does not teach that Jesus was appointed, established or installed Son of God at or by the resurrection, since he has been the Son of God eternally. This leads to the suggestion that the words ‘in power’ should be attached to the noun ‘Son of God’ rather than to th...