Introduction to Romans

Guest (Male): Christianity has been the most powerful transforming force in world history, and many have suggested that the Book of Romans is the most comprehensive, basic statement of true Christianity in the entire Word of God. But why? Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, teaching you to think and act biblically. Today we begin an exciting new series in the Book of Romans. Through this study, our faith will be challenged and revived as we study this letter to the Romans from the Apostle Paul. Justification by faith only: this powerful theme runs throughout the Book of Romans, and it's a theme that has sometimes changed the course of history. As we start our new series on Romans, we'll be reminded of this theme time and time again, and we'll see God's transcendent holiness, power, and love as a call to a living, disciplined faith. Let's turn to Romans chapter one now and begin.
Dr. James Boice: Nearly 2,000 years ago, in the bustling city of Corinth in Greece, a Jewish rabbi who had become a Christian sat down to write a letter to believers in the far-off city of Rome whom he had never seen. What a letter it was! In any other circumstances and by any other hand, it might have been merely an incidental piece of correspondence. But this was the Apostle Paul, and by his hand, and through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit of God, this ancient document became what is in my judgment the greatest and most influential document ever penned. Most studies of Romans begin with a number of quotations and stories to reinforce that point, but let me give you just two examples. The first concerns St. Augustine. Augustine was a pagan philosopher who for many years of his life was under conviction concerning the truthfulness of Christianity. He was brilliant and attractive, but he was also an immoral man, as many of the pagans were, and the sin he practiced quite clearly held him in a vice-like grip. Augustine believed in Christianity, but as he describes his experience in his confessions, he found it impossible to turn from his life of sin and make the necessary commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. One day, while he was wrestling with these things in the garden of a friend's estate in Milan, Italy, he heard a child singing on the other side of a wall that was the border of the garden. The child was singing the Latin words "tolle lege, tolle lege," which means "take and read." Augustine said he never heard a child's song with those words before; probably there hadn't been one. He took this song, which came under such auspicious circumstances, as a message from God. So he got up from where he was sitting, he went across the garden to a table where there was a copy of the Bible, and opening it at random, he read the first words that met his anguished gaze. The words were from Romans, from the 13th chapter, verses 13 and 14: "Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature." That was exactly what Augustine needed. As he describes what happened, he said it was as he read those words as if light broke into the darkness of his soul. He found himself transformed, and from that moment on, he became a follower of Jesus Christ. Augustine, who became St. Augustine, was beyond any doubt the greatest mind, teacher, and leader in the Christian church in all the centuries between the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther. Now, the second example is the Protestant reformer himself. Martin Luther was no profligate pagan as Augustine was; quite the contrary, Luther was a devout and pious monk and apparent Christian. But Luther had no peace to his soul. Luther had entered the monastery in order to find God, but the more he pursued God, as it seemed, the more elusive God became. Luther knew that he should love God, but as he studied the law of God and even as he studied the gospel, he found that instead of loving God, he actually came to hate God because the burden that God seemed to place upon him was so great. Luther began to study the Bible and particularly Romans. As he studied the Book of Romans, he found the very thing that was necessary for discovering peace of soul. He found it in the first chapter. He didn't have to go very far, verse 17: "For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: 'The righteous will live by faith.'" As Luther studied that, God gave him understanding, and he realized that the way that we become acceptable to God is not by any works of righteousness that we can do because at the best all our good works are imperfect, but rather by receiving from God a righteousness which he himself provides, a righteousness that is received by simple faith, by believing him. Luther later came to write about his conversion, and this is what he said: "I had no love for that holy and just God who punishes sinners. I was filled with secret anger against him. I hated him because, not content with frightening by the law and the miseries of life us wretched sinners already ruined by original sin, he still further increased our tortures by the gospel. But when, by the Spirit of God, I understood the words, when I learned how the justification of the sinner proceeds from the free mercy of our Lord through faith, then I felt born again like a new man. In very truth, this language of St. Paul was to me the true gate of paradise." It's no wonder that later, when Luther came to write down his studies of this great letter of Paul to the Romans, he said at the very start of his introduction, "Romans is the chief part of the New Testament and the very purest gospel." And he commended it to all Christians in these words: "Every Christian should know it word for word by heart and occupy himself with it every day as the daily bread of his soul." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet, called Romans the profoundest book in existence. Frederick Godet, the Swiss commentator, wrote that in all probability every great spiritual revival in the church will be connected as effect and cause with a deeper understanding of this book. But is that really true, or is that an overstatement? We live in a skeptical age, and I think it not unreasonable to imagine that when words like that are read or spoken today, there are always people who will be skeptical and critical of them. They would say it may be true, maybe history shows it to be true, that those verses from the 13th chapter of Romans transformed the life of St. Augustine. We know it to be true that Augustine, by the force of his intellect and perhaps as you would say, by the power of God, transformed the church and preserved orthodox Christianity and therefore influenced history. And we know that it was these verses from the first chapter of Romans that changed the life of Martin Luther, and Luther certainly had an impact on history through the Protestant Reformation. But after all, that was thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago in the case of Luther. Are we really to believe that that kind of an impact can flow from a study of the Book of Romans in our day? I want to maintain that that's exactly what we can expect. We can expect it personally, and we can expect it in our church and society. The reason is a very simple one: it's just this. Christianity has been the most powerful transforming force in history, and the Book of Romans is the most basic, comprehensive statement of true Christianity in the Word of God. Let me say that again. Christianity has been the most profound transforming force in human history, and the Book of Romans is the most basic, comprehensive statement of true Christianity in all the Word of God. Now, there are people who wouldn't agree with that. In certain ages of church history, there have been teachers who have objected to the theological kind of material we have in Romans and have said that what we need is not so much a study of the theological portions of the New Testament as an attempt to recapture what they call the simple teachings of Jesus. Jesus came to teach us that God is love, they say. What we need to do is tell people that that's his nature, that God loves them. Or again, there are people who would contrast the theological portions of the Book of Romans with ethics. They would say, "What we need is not doctrine; doctrine divides. What we need are ethics; ethics are uplifting to people and ethics unite us when we really try together to do the right thing." Well, as usual, arguments like these have a seed of wisdom, but they fail because they miss the chief problem. The chief problem, you see, is not that we need to know that God loves us. We have enough sense to know that all by ourselves, though at times we doubt it. The fact is that we don't love God. That's the problem. It's the thing that Luther found. Luther knew that he should love God, but he found that he couldn't do it. Or again, you see the problem is not with the matter of ethics. Most of us know plenty of ethics. We know what we should do; the problem is that we don't do it. And we suspect, when we're honest with ourselves, that deep down in our nature we actually find it impossible to do what we know is required. The gospel, you see, deals with that problem. It shows how, although we can't please God, God reaches down to change us. And not only does he remove from us the burden and condemnation of our sins, he gives us the new life of Jesus Christ within and the power of the Holy Spirit that enables us to live a life of victory over sin and so by his grace, exert an uplifting, helpful, and transforming power in the world in which we live rather than being something that harms others and carries the race on a downward course. In the weeks and months ahead, we're going to be looking at Romans in some detail. I think it's helpful, however, at the beginning of a series of studies like this to attempt something of an overview of the book. That's what I want to do in the remainder of this study. Let me suggest how we should look at it. Romans has two opening sections, it has four major portions, and it has a concluding section of personal greetings. The first of the opening sections is what we would call an introduction, technically. It's in the form of an ancient letter. It was common in the writing of ancient letters for the author to begin with his name, go on to speak of those to whom he is writing, and then to append a kind of formal greeting to them. This is the format that Paul follows. And yet as we read this, we discover that although this is a typical way in which a letter begins, this is no typical ancient letter. This is a doctrinal treatise sandwiched between the beginning and closing of a letter, and even at the beginning in this important introduction, Paul begins to suggest the thing about which he is writing. It concerns, he says, the gospel of God. The word "gospel" means "good news." So Paul is going to write about God's good news. And this is not just good news; this is good, good news because it flows from God, who is the source of all good. This good news of the gospel is therefore superlatively excellent. In the second section, verses 16 and 17 of chapter one, Paul presents what in today's speech we would call his thesis. This is the basic statement of what the gospel is all about. In the opening section, he has spoken of the gospel of God and he's pointed out, as we'll see when we come to study it, that it centers in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It's all about him. But a person who has read those first 15 verses of the book might at that point say, "Well, it's all very good that there is good news from God that concerns this man named Jesus, but what is it exactly that he's done? What is this good news of God specifically?" And Paul explains that in his thesis. He says that this gospel of God is God's power. And it's a power unto salvation, salvation from our sin. And it expresses itself fundamentally in the gift to us of a righteousness which in ourselves we do not have. Moreover, as Paul shows, this is something that has been promised in the past because way back in the Old Testament, in the Book of Habakkuk, one of the minor prophets, this basic principle is stated. Paul writes, "For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last." These are the verses that transformed the life of Martin Luther. In verse 18 of chapter one and continuing to the end of chapter four, we have the third section of the book and the first major section of Paul's argument. Here Paul is going to present the gospel in brief form. He begins, however, by speaking not of God's good news, but of the human dilemma, of our depravity, of the fact that we are in rebellion against sin and that we're in rebellion against God willfully; that is, we're to blame for the things that we've done. Paul speaks here of the knowledge of God, and he points out that even in our sinful state, men and women have a certain knowledge of God. It's not a saving knowledge of God, but it's a knowledge that God exists, that he's powerful, and this is the kind of knowledge of him that they receive from nature. Paul says, however, that although this revelation of God has been made clear to us in the things that we see, we're nevertheless to blame because instead of allowing this natural revelation of God to lead us on to seek him and to fall down before him and worship him when he's found, we repress that knowledge and turn from it, chiefly because we do not like the kind of God to which the revelation leads. If God is anything, God is a sovereign God, but we don't want a sovereign God. Why, a sovereign God is a God who rules over us, and we want to rule our own lives. And so, says Paul, we suppress that knowledge and we substitute other things in God's place. Sometimes it's self-fulfillment, sometimes it's our own desires for our lives, sometimes it's another person. Quite often, as was the case in Paul's own day, it's artificial or substitute gods—gods, as Paul says, that are not the true God but are rather man-made creations made not in the image of the true God but in the image of God's creation, like man himself or even like animals. Paul says that God's not indifferent to that situation. God doesn't merely shrug his shoulders and say, "Well, it doesn't matter to me." Instead, says Paul, God abandons men to the consequences of their sin. Since God is the source of all good, if men and women reject God, then they turn from that which is good to that which is evil. And following the natural outworking of their own sinful desires, they enter upon a downhill path which Paul elaborates in the latter half of chapter one. God abandons them to one sin after the other, and they find eventually not only that they progress from sin to sin, but that they are enmeshed in sin so they cannot set themselves free. In the third chapter, he sums it all up. First of all, negatively, he says because of this analysis, everyone is involved in sin. Everyone has the same need. There's no one who understands, no one who seeks God, no one who is righteous. But, he says positively, it is at that very point, at the point of the greatest summation of our need, that the gospel of God in Jesus Christ enters in. Because Jesus Christ has come to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And the gospel is the announcement of that superlative good news. Jesus Christ has died for us in order that our sin might be punished in him. Jesus rose from the dead to live for us so that the power of his life might enter into our lives and begin to lead us in the way that we should go. The fourth chapter also belongs to this section because a person might well say at this point that good as that may sound, it must nevertheless be wrong because it's novel. We've never heard anything like that before, said some of Paul's hearers. And Paul answers in this fourth chapter that far from being novel, this gospel that he's explained in chapters one through three is actually the way God has operated throughout all of human history. To prove it, he goes back to the Old Testament and quotes some verses that have to do with the patriarch Abraham and King David. And he shows that it was precisely in this way that those men were saved. Now, the second of these major sections and the fourth of the sections as I'm describing them is found in chapters five through eight. Some commentators have looked at this section and have said that you have here a major change of subject on Paul's part. Up to this point, Paul has been talking about justification; now Paul shifts gears and talks about sanctification. Now, it's true that in these chapters Paul certainly talks about sanctification, that is, about the growth in holiness of the Christian. But I would submit that this is basically a misunderstanding. What Paul is talking about here is the certainty and finality of the salvation which he's explained in the opening of the book. What Paul wants to show in these chapters is that this thing that has begun in us by God is not something that's capable of rejection or interruption, but rather something that continues because it's of God and God is faithful to his people. He begins to show it in terms of what happens in us in the moment of our justification. Paul says in the first portion of Romans five that when we're justified, it's not merely that we're justified, but that other things follow from that. We have a change of nature, we're born again, and so we enter into a whole new set of privileges and opportunities. In the second portion of that chapter, he shows a second thing that happens: we are joined to Jesus Christ. So from that point on, we live life not merely in our own power or by our own strength or according to our own wisdom, but by the power of Jesus Christ with whom we are joined. People who study this sort of thing say, and perhaps it's true, that that is the dominant idea in Paul's theological writings. 164 times in his writings, Paul speaks of being "in Christ" or being united to Christ Jesus. In the sixth chapter, Paul deals with our slavery to sin, and he says not only are we united to Christ when God saves us, but the power of sin over us is broken, so we're set free from it. In the seventh chapter, he talks about the law. He says we're set free from the principle of law so that now we serve and obey God, not by trying to live up to some detailed list of external regulations which we always find impossible, but rather because now, having a new nature, we want to love him and serve him, and we do so in the most profound and transforming ways. And then in the eighth chapter, Paul looks on to the end of the process and says it inevitably results in glorification, because God, who has begun a good work in us, will surely keep on perfecting it until the day of Jesus Christ. And for this reason, as he says, nothing in heaven or on earth will ever separate us from the love and power of God through Jesus. In chapters nine through 11, we have another section. The people who see a break between chapters four and five inevitably see a chasm between chapters eight and nine. According to this outlook, Paul in these chapters actually enters upon what these teachers call a parenthesis. He's dealt with the gospel and sanctification; now he takes a break from all of that to talk about God's work with the Jewish people, perhaps even talking about it as a different, separate, and fundamentally different work. I think that is wrong too. What Paul is dealing with here is history. The question would be raised, you see, that if God saves men through Jesus Christ and if, as it seemed—and Paul would have been ready to acknowledge that in his day—that the Jewish people as a whole were not believing on Jesus, then either one of two things must follow: either, number one, God saves people apart from Jesus Christ. That's to say the Jews are saved in a different way. Or number two, the Jews are not saved because they don't believe in Jesus Christ. And if that's true, then how can you say that God is faithful to his promises? Paul's just written about the security of the Christian; how can he speak about that if God has broken faith with Israel? What Paul does in these chapters is show that God has not broken faith with his people. God is utterly consistent. God operates today precisely as he has operated in the past. God saves people by grace, through faith. And therefore salvation is of God and not by any human position or human merit. In other words, no Jew was ever saved simply by being a Jew. And there was no period in history when every Jew was saved just because he or she was a member of the covenant people. And in the same way, today, no one is saved just because of who they are or because of the position in life to which they were born. No one is automatically saved by God just because they're a member of a church or because they've been baptized or because they're an American or a philanthropist or even because they're a child of Christian parents. God saves by grace through Jesus Christ. And so Paul, in a profound, analytical way, spells all of that out in these chapters. And when he gets to the end, he's so impressed with the wisdom of God in salvation that he interrupts the letter to give a great benediction: "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out!" In chapter 12 through the 13th verse of chapter 15, Paul deals with the practical outworkings of this gospel in individual and national life. Paul was no armchair theologian, no ivory-tower divine. Paul was eminently practical. He deals with theology because that's the way God produces change, but he doesn't overlook the change. And so in these chapters, he begins to show what the life of one who has been thus transformed and saved by God will be. And in the final section, beginning with the 14th verse of chapter 15 and going the whole way to the end of the book, he gives his final greetings, showing what his plans are—his plans to visit Rome—and sending greetings to those he knew were in Rome from those at Corinth. In the 19th chapter of Acts, the historian Luke tells us that when Paul was in the city of Ephesus, he spent two years teaching the Word of the Lord to all who were in Asia. There's an ancient manuscript that adds at that point that he did so for five hours each day. If that's true, if Paul taught five hours a day, calculating six days a week and 52 weeks a year for two years, Paul spent 3,120 hours instructing these Christians. That is more instruction than most seminarians receive in a three or four-year course working toward a Bachelor or a Master's of Theology degree. What do you suppose Paul taught to those people in Asia during those long two years? I would maintain that what Paul taught them was precisely what we find in the Book of Romans in a shortened form. He taught them their need: what is wrong with human life? Something's wrong with human life; what is it? Paul taught them what it was. He taught them God's solution to the problem, and he showed how God, in that solution, brings us into an eternal salvation. How he does with us as he has always done with people. And now, having done that, he now works in us to produce the kind of change which is a blessing to ourselves, our families, and to our society. Is Romans relevant? It is as long as men and women are estranged from God because of sin. Is Christianity relevant? It is as long as it brings us back to God, overcoming the alienation, frees us from sin, empowers us to live for holiness, and directs us in such a way that we bring worthwhile transformations to our age. Robert Haldane was a Scottish commentator on Romans who lived in the 19th century, and he said as he drew to the end of his exposition of this book: "Paul, writing without any of the aids of human wisdom, draws his precepts from the fountain of heavenly truth and inculcates on the disciples of Jesus a code of duties which, if habitually practiced by mankind, would change the world from what it is, a scene of strife, jealousy, and division, and make it what it was before the entrance of sin: a paradise fit for the Lord to visit us and for man to dwell in." Let us pray. Our Father, we would ask at the start of these studies of this great New Testament book that you would so bless our efforts that some of these benefits that have been seen in earlier ages might be found in us too. And that we might experience personally a time of great renewal and that our church and nation might be blessed as this great gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is unfolded to our age. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.
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