Romans 1

¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Jared Wilson has imagined what the label might say if each church were forced to have a Nutrition Facts label.

Paul writes in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”

Yet if we could label our churches with the Nutrition Facts found on your can of soup, I reckon many would say in the fine print, “Not a significant source of gospel.” Are we ashamed?

If the gospel is the power to save, shouldn’t it be the meat of the message, not saved for the add-on invitation or for a special service every few weeks?[1]

That is a valid question and a good one. I wonder: if our church had a Nutrition Facts label on the outside, what would it say? Regardless of what the answer is, this is what the answer should be: THE GOSPEL!

Romans 1:16-17 is a most fascinating passage. In it, Paul gives a helpful explanation of why the gospel was so prominent on his own label.

The gospel is the saving power of God.

Paul begins with the rather startling statement that the gospel is the power of God!

¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

We must not miss the disdain that such a comment would have been met with in the Roman Empire of two millennia ago. The idea of the Christian gospel (i.e., that God had come in Christ, laid down His life willingly on a cross, had risen again, and that all who come to Him will be saved) being power was ludicrous to the Romans of the time. This is why Paul begins his statement by noting that he was not ashamed. He was, in other words, anticipating the hoots of derision that his comment would invite.

Rightly did the 5^th century patriarch Gennadius of Constantinople explain:

Those who objected to the Christian gospel ridiculed it, mocking it because of its absurdity. For there is nothing more ridiculous than the word of someone who preaches that the Son of God was born and brought up by Jews, who rejects neither the cross nor death, who says moreover not only that Christ rose from the dead but that he ascended to heaven as Lord of all, that he will raise everyone else from the dead, and other things the apostles preached. The pagans mocked these things and ridiculed them, thinking that they would make the apostles shut up. Therefore St. Paul, feeling obliged to reply to this opinion of the apostles, began his teaching thus: I am not ashamed of the gospel.

Before Gennadius wrote, the great John Chrysostom had written:

The Romans were most anxious about the things of the world, because of their riches, their empire, their victories, and they thought that their emperors were equal to the gods…While they were so puffed up, Paul was going to preach Jesus, the carpenter’s son who was brought up in Judea, in the house of a lower-class woman, who had no bodyguards, who was not surrounded by wealth, but who died as a criminal among thieves and endured many other inglorious afflictions. Since it was likely that the Romans were pretending that they did not know any of these unspeakable things, Paul understates that he is not ashamed, in order to teach them not to be ashamed of Christ either.[2]

To the pagan mind, the message of the cross was many things, but power was not one of them. In fact, the powerlessness of the cross made the idea of calling it divine power not only absurd but also insane. But Paul says that this gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.” Any pagan of the day would have been ashamed to make such a suggestion, but Paul was not ashamed. Regrettably, the Church throughout time has oftentimes acted as if it was also ashamed. As a result, the Church has too often sought the favor of the worldly powers instead of the power of the cross.

Werner Herzog’s cult-classic 1972 film, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” is about a Spanish conquistador named Lope de Aguirre who descends into madness during a quest to find El Dorado and who begins to kill any who oppose his delusional grasp for power. There is a heartbreaking scene in which the wife of Don Pedro de Ursua, a legitimate leader whose death Aguirre arranged, pleads for help to the only representative of the Church in their band of explorers, a monk named Brother Gaspar de Carvajal. She pleads for his help and asks him to stand up against Aguirre and his murderous ways and protect her and the others who oppose him. Instead of helping her, the monk chillingly says: “You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the Church always was on the side of the strong.” By this meant that the Church always sides with the worldly powers so it can survive. So instead of helping the terrified woman the monk sided with Aguirre.

Let us note the disjunction between Aguirre’s comment, “the Church always was on the side of the strong” and Paul’s statement that “the gospel” is “the power of God.” Anytime the Church trusts in worldly power it is denying the true power of God: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Earlier, Paul put it like this in 1 Corinthians 1:

¹⁸ For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

The reason why the Church must be an authentic family around the whole gospel is because the gospel and the gospel alone is the power of God unto salvation. The gospel is the only legitimate power. It alone can save us and it alone can empower us for it alone tells us who God is and what He has done and is doing for us in Christ Jesus. The gospel resides at the center of the Church like a power source for it is through the gospel that we come to Jesus and so receive right union and power with God and the power that He gives us.

One of the great old hymns that we do not hear quite so much anymore is Lewis Jones’ 1899 hymn, “There is Power in the Blood.”

Would you be free from the burden of sin?

There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood;

Would you o’er evil a victory win?

There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the blood of the Lamb;

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the precious blood of the Lamb.

Would you be free from your passion and pride?

There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood;

Come for a cleansing to Calvary’s tide;

There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the blood of the Lamb;

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the precious blood of the Lamb.

Would you be whiter, much whiter than snow?

There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood;

Sin-stains are lost in its life-giving flow;

There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the blood of the Lamb;

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the precious blood of the Lamb.

An authentic family around the whole gospel is a family that has bound itself to the fact that the blood of Christ is powerful and the story of that blood and all that it means, the gospel, is the power of God!

The gospel shows us God’s righteousness and therefore shows us the way that we must live.

I did not quote Lewis Jones’ final stanza just now, but it is very important. Here is how Jones concluded his hymn.

Would you do service for Jesus your King?

There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood;

Would you live daily His praises to sing?

There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the blood of the Lamb;

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r

In the precious blood of the Lamb.

That is fascinating, because Jones moves from the power of the blood of Christ to save to the power of the gospel to enable us to live our lives. Paul makes the same movement from Romans 1:16 to Romans 1:17. Watch the flow of thought:

¹⁶ For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. ¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

In verse 17 Paul explains what he means in verse 16. He begins by saying that the gospel is the power of God for salvation because “in it the righteousness of God is revealed.”

The phrase, “the righteousness of God is revealed,” literally reads, “the righteousness of God is being revealed.” “The present tense,” writes Douglas Moo, “suggests that Paul is thinking of an ongoing process…connected with the preaching of the gospel. Wherever the gospel is being proclaimed, the ‘righteousness of God’ in its eschatological fullness if being disclosed.”[3]

That is helpful, because it lets us know that the revealing of the righteousness of God is not bound to the cross alone but is rather bound to the day-by-day encounters with the crucified Christ that both the Church and the world have when the world is evangelized. Whenever the reality of the love of God displayed on the cross of Christ breaks free in a human heart it inevitably reveals the righteousness of God.

But how are we to understand this righteousness. Colin Cruse observes that the word “righteousness…occurs thirty-four times in twenty-nine verses in Romans.” He further notes that “the righteousness of God” can be and has been interpreted in three different ways.

• “righteousness that comes from God (and is presumable bestowed by him upon those who believe)”
• “‘righteousness’ being understood as a quality of God”
• “God’s righteousness understood as God-initiated action”

Cruse suggests that there are strengths with all of these views and that “we could say that the righteousness of God is his saving action whereby he brings people into a right relationship with himself.”[4]

But what of the phrase, “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith”? This is a tricky phrase and one that interpreters of scripture have struggled to understand for years. Douglas Moo has listed the various interpretations of the phrase:

• “that God’s righteousness was ‘from the faith in the law to the faith in the gospel’”
• “that Paul wished to include both the faith of the preacher and the faith of the hearer”
• “a reference to the growth of faith in the individual, enabling the Christian to appreciate and enjoy more and more the righteousness of God”
• “that the first ‘faith’ refers to God’s faithfulness, and the second the faith of the individual person”
• “that Paul wants to stress both that righteousness is received by faith and is for all who believe”
• “that Paul attributes our righteousness both to Christ’s faithfulness…and to our own believing”
• that in these words is “a thrust against Judaism: righteousness is both received by faith and has faith, not works, as its goal”

Moo, however, suggests that, “in light of the only clear NT parallel to the construction, the combination is rhetorical and is intended to emphasize that faith and ‘nothing but faith’ can put us into right relationship with God.”[5] Perhaps that is a good way of looking at it, though we should also highlight the apparently dynamic and living nature of such faith. “From faith for faith” suggests some kind of movement. Outwardly, the phrase refers to the way in which faith moves from one believer to another or from one believer to a non-believer through proclamation or witness. Inwardly, the phrase refers to the way in which faith leads to greater faith within the believer. The upshot is that the righteousness of God that is revealed in the gospel and received through faith in the crucified Christ is a powerful and dynamic and living force that propels both us and the gospel message forward.

It is therefore not surprising that Paul moves next to the issue of the living of our lives.

¹⁷ For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

That last phrase is in quotation marks because Paul is quoting it from Habakkuk 2:4.

⁴ Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

So the gospel is the power of God because it reveals the righteousness of God that is received by faith and faith alone and because it enables us to now live our lives in a state of continuous faith in God’s righteousness instead of our own! Properly understood, this is a liberating verse! We live through continuous trust in the righteousness of God in Christ. Left to our own righteousness, we are doomed, for we have no righteousness. But the righteousness of God preeminently displayed on the cross is our salvation and we receive it through faith.

It was this verse, Romans 1:17, that absolutely rocked the world of a young monk named Martin Luther five hundred years ago. Christianity Today has given a nice summary of Luther’s relationship with this verse:

During his early years, whenever Luther read what would become the famous “Reformation text”—Romans 1:17—his eyes were drawn not to the word faith, but to the word righteous. Who, after all, could “live by faith” but those who were already righteous? The text was clear on the matter: “the righteous shall live by faith.”

Luther remarked, “I hated that word, ‘the righteousness of God,’ by which I had been taught according to the custom and use of all teachers … [that] God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.” The young Luther could not live by faith because he was not righteous—and he knew it.

Meanwhile, he was ordered to take his doctorate in the Bible and become a professor at Wittenberg University. During lectures on the Psalms (in 1513 and 1514) and a study of the Book of Romans, he began to see a way through his dilemma. “At last meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I … began to understand that the righteousness of God is that through which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith… Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”[6]

I believe that Luther was right. We are declared righteous before God through faith in Jesus Christ. Once the gospel is received, it is set loose in our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit to embolden and empower us for right living! So when we say that the Church must become an authentic family around the whole gospel we are really saying that it is only through the gospel that the Church can become anything at all! The gospel is the story that gives us life because it is the story of Jesus who alone can raise us from the dead! The gospel is the power of God because the gospel is simply the story of the Jesus who is God with us.

If we lose the gospel, we lose our only source of true power. True, we might sell our souls for a sliver of worldly power, but where will that get us? It will ultimately frustrate us because all worldly powers are necessarily temporary. Furthermore, we are not called to worldly power but rather to the crucified and risen Lord who alone is true power!

So what we must do, time and time again, is return to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We must receive it in faith and thereby be saved and we must proclaim it with consistency and thereby call ourselves and others time and time again back to it.

Church, we must not lose this gospel! Without it we are lame and deaf and blind and mute, but with it…we live!

Martin Buber has told a powerful story about the power of a true story to give us life.

A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story. “A story,” he said, “must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself.” And he told: “My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour he was cured of his lameness.”[7]

Ah, there it is! That is the role that the story and reality of the gospel plays in the life of the Church. We are all lame and crippled. We have no life in and of ourselves. But when we tell the story of the Christ who laid down His life, suddenly we are empowered to lay down our lives! And when we tell the story of the crucified and dead Jesus who opened His eyes and came back to life on the third day, we too open our eyes and come back to life. Why? Because there is power in the story! It is the power of God to save and to point us forward!

The gospel helps us who are crippled by sin to learn to dance again! Through the gospel, Jesus Christ puts life back in our dead frames and puts a song on our mute lips and gives sight to our blind eyes and unstops our deaf ears.

As we rejoice in the gospel and proclaim the gospel and celebrate the gospel and, above all else, receive through faith the gospel, we feel ourselves stand up! We stand up and begin to dance and sing because then and only then do we have life!

 

[1] https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/11/dude-wheres-my-gospel

[2] Gerald Bray, ed., Romans. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed., Thomas C. Oden. New Testament, Vol. VI (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p.30.

[3] Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), p.70.

[4] Colin G. Kruse, Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The Pillar New Testament Commentary. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012)

[5] Douglas J. Moo, p.76.

[6] https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/theologians/martin-luther.html

[7] Martin Buber, The Tales: The Early Masters. (Schocken Books, 1961), p.iv-v.