Romans 1 (Part 1)

Romans — Steve Gregg

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Romans 1 (Part 2)

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Romans 1 (Part 1)

RomansSteve Gregg

The first half of Romans 1 according to Paul's letter emphasizes that the gospel message was not new, but rather a fulfilled promise from the Old Testament. Jesus, as the son of God, was declared through his resurrection and his title as Lord is crucial to acknowledging his divinity. Paul's message of grace and peace are for all nations, and being thankful is crucial to entering God's presence. Overall, the letter to the Romans speaks of righteousness and the importance of recognizing Jesus as the fulfillment of old promises.

Transcript

Alright, returning to Romans 1. Last time we broached the chapter barely. We got into verse 1 where Paul simply introduces himself, and you'd think there'd be very little to say about an introduction, except that he did say a couple things about himself that drew some comment. Notice that he was called to be an apostle.

He said he was a bond servant of Jesus Christ. I didn't mention that, but that's how Paul always refers to himself. First, as a bond servant, and secondarily, as an apostle.

Now, the word apostle carried a lot of weight in the early church, and frankly, it would still carry a lot of weight in the modern church if we had people that were indisputably apostles of the type that Peter and James and John and Paul were. That is, they were the people who were the true leaders of the first century church during their lifetimes, and who remain the leaders of the church to this day. Those same men, because they left us their writings, and that's why we study them.

We study the New Testament because it was written by the apostles, and the apostles are the ones that Jesus himself authorized and appointed to speak on his behalf. I don't know of any people today who hold such an office or that kind of authority. I don't expect to find people like that, although I'm not saying there aren't any, I just don't know of any.

And I don't know that we need any, because we have preserved in the scripture the apostolic witness. Anyone who is an apostle today would only have to be here to confirm what the apostles already said, or if he disagreed with it, he'd be a false apostle. So I don't know really what function a new apostle would have, although, of course, missionaries have some of the functions of an apostle.

But Paul and the apostles of his day had a special authority in the church, though he was not authoritarian for the most part. I mean, he could discipline churches when they were out of line, but he didn't like to. He was not a bossy person.

We find him saying, for example, in 2 Corinthians 1, in verse 24, when he's talking about his authority in the church of Corinth, which he was the founder of that church, and he referred to himself as their father in the faith. And yet he says to them in 2 Corinthians 1, 24, he says, So Paul didn't have this ego trip or this power trip that comes along sometimes with positions of authority. He said, I don't have dominion over you.

You stand before God by your own faith. This is between you and God. I'm here just to help.

I'm here to bolster you. I'm here to assist you. I'm a worker together with you toward your enjoyment of your Christian life.

But I don't have dominion over you. Now, Paul certainly could, if he wished, exercise dominion. He just wasn't that type.

It's kind of nice when somebody who actually has an amount of authority that could have been dangerous in the wrong hands, when he's a safe person. And in 1 Thessalonians, when he's writing to the Thessalonians, who also were his children in the faith, he had founded that church also. In 1 Thessalonians 2, he's reminding them of how he and his partners in the ministry had conducted themselves when they were there in that town.

And he said in verse 6 and 7, this is 1 Thessalonians 2, 6 and 7, he says, Nor did we seek glory from men, either from you or from others, when we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, just like a nursing mother cherishes her own children. So, although Paul held an authority in the church that was second to none, especially in the Gentile churches, because he was the preeminent apostle to the Gentiles, he did not dominate, he didn't have dominion.

He said, we could have made demands of you as apostles, we have that right, but we just never did that. We were more gentle, we're like a mother taking care of her children. And this is how Paul was, he had a very impressive title, but he didn't try to impress people much with it.

Before he called himself an apostle, he called himself a slave. And so when he refers to himself in the beginning of his epistles, he essentially always says he's a bond servant. And a bond servant would be a voluntary slave.

Because under the law of Moses, a person could be made a slave involuntarily because of his debts. If he's a Hebrew slave, he was to be offered his freedom after seven years of servitude. And he would not ever have to serve again.

Seven years was all, and then he was free. But the law made provision for this slave, if he said, I don't really want to be free. I love my master, I love the family I'm with here.

I don't want to stop being a slave. Well, then he could become a slave for life. And that was voluntary, he didn't have to.

And if he wanted to become a slave for life, he became a bond servant and they put an earring in his ear. And that was the mark that he was a voluntary slave. And Paul spoke of himself in those terms.

Jesus had said to the apostles, of course, Paul was not among them at the time in the upper room. But he later was recognized as being of the same status as they. In the upper room in John 15, Jesus said, I don't call you slaves anymore, I call you friends.

Okay, so Jesus calls his friends not slaves. But he went on to say, you're my friends if you do everything I command you. So it's that kind of a friendship, you know.

You're not my slave, you're my friend, but you have to obey me, you know. And Paul, therefore, as an apostle, also not called a slave, not by Christ anyway, called himself a slave. He's a slave by choice.

Jesus calls me a friend, but I want to be a slave. I'm a voluntary slave of Christ. And that's how he identified himself, Peter did too in his epistles.

But notice Paul does mention his own apostleship, but not before he mentions his slave status. Paul, a bond servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle. It's interesting, he doesn't say a bond servant and apostle as if he somehow intrinsically owned the privilege of being an authoritative apostle.

He was just called to be. It wasn't his doing, it wasn't his own inner virtue that made him automatically an apostle. It's that he was a slave, happened to be appointed by his master to a role of spiritual authority over other servants.

He does appeal to his apostleship, of course, because it's important that he's an apostle. It's important when you're reading a book to know whether it's written by an apostle or by an ordinary Christian guy. If I write a book, I don't expect people to accept it the way they would accept it if Paul or Peter or some apostle wrote it, because I'm not appointed by Christ in the church with the authority they had.

The reason we have the books we have in the New Testament, as opposed to many other books that we don't have that could have been put in, is that the books we have are apostolic. They either were written by an apostle or, in a few cases, by somebody extremely close to and under the supervision of an apostle whose writings were considered to have apostolic sanction. Luke, for example, was not an apostle, but he was an inseparable companion of Paul, who was.

There's no way Luke could have written his material and published it without Paul's approval. Likewise, Mark was not an apostle, but he was a companion of Peter. According to the early church, Mark got his information from Peter.

In fact, he was just a translator of Peter's sermons, and Mark's material has Peter's backing. Very few books in our New Testament are not written by apostles, but they are written by companions of apostles. They are in the Bible because they are considered to have apostolic authority.

Other books that were considered for canonization in the New Testament, like the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas or some of the other early Christian writings that were floating around in the early 2nd century, which the church respected and read profitably and considered edifying, they didn't make it into the New Testament because they weren't apostolic. They're good books. It'd be like someone suggesting we should put mere Christianity and the pursuit of God.

C.S. Lewis and A.W. Tozer's works, we should put those in our Bible. Well, not quite. They're great books, and everybody ought to read them, but they don't belong in the Bible.

They're not written by apostles of Jesus Christ. That's why we can consider the New Testament to be the Word of God or the authoritative scripture to us because it is preserving the apostolic witness and the apostolic teaching. It's important that Paul say he's an apostle, or at least that people know he is.

They might know it without him saying so, but he wants to make sure that everyone knows he's not just writing a friendly letter from one Christian to another, as many Christians probably did write to each other, but this is from an apostle. This should be received as an official communique from one who speaks in the person of Christ because Jesus said in John 13, 20, He that receives him that I send receives me. The word apostolos in the Greek means one who is sent.

So the one who is sent by Christ as an apostle, receiving that one is like receiving Jesus. I can't say that about myself. Certainly God might use me to speak to somebody, but I can't say, if you accept what I say, you're accepting what Jesus says because I might get it wrong.

I don't have that kind of authority. No teacher does that I know, but the apostles did. So when Paul says I'm called to be an apostle, he's saying, okay, right there, your ears should open up, say this is coming from someone whom Jesus said, you receive this man, you're receiving me.

It's as good as if Jesus wrote it and sent it. So he says I'm separated to the gospel of God. We pointed out that the word separated may allude to the fact that he had formerly been a Pharisee, which means a separated one.

He had been separated in his earlier life to the law. Now he's separated to the gospel of God. And having mentioned the gospel of God, he now has finished talking by himself and wants to talk about the gospel.

And this book is going to be about the gospel for the most part. And he makes a number of subordinate statements to this phrase, the gospel of God. By the way, the same gospel is sometimes called the gospel of Christ.

Sometimes Paul even refers to it as my gospel in a number of places. But there's not multiple gospels. Some people say there's two gospels, one preached by Jesus, one preached by Paul.

That Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom of God and that Paul preached the gospel of grace. In case you're wondering, the people who say that are called dispensationalists. They believe that when Jesus was here, he preached the gospel of the kingdom.

One message, which if the Jews had received it, things would have gone very differently. But because they didn't receive it, he retracted the kingdom of God. He postponed it until the millennium.

And in the meantime, another gospel has been inserted into history through Paul, called the gospel of grace, and that we live in a dispensation where we should, they say, be preaching the gospel of grace, as Paul did, rather than the gospel of the kingdom, as Jesus did. But just in case anyone may be confused by having heard anything like that, I want to turn your attention quickly to Acts 20. In Acts 20, verses 24 and 25, Paul is talking to the elders of the church of Ephesus, his own converts and the leaders he had left in charge of the church.

He's passing through and had a conference with them briefly. And he said to them, as he's told about some of the bad things that the prophets had said await him as he goes to Jerusalem, he says, none of these things move me, nor do I count my life dear to myself so that I may finish my race with joy and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. Now, this is no doubt where the idea comes from that Paul preached a gospel called the gospel of grace.

This is the only verse in the Bible that has something like that in a phrase, the gospel of the grace of God. This is the closest thing to the gospel of grace you find in a passage in the Bible. This is the statement.

But look at the next one, verse 25. And indeed, now I know that you all, among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God, will see my face no more. Well, make up your mind, Paul.

Are you preaching the gospel of the kingdom or are you preaching the gospel of grace? Well, Paul didn't have to make up his mind. As far as he's concerned, there's only one gospel. You can call it the gospel of God.

You can call it the gospel of Christ, the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of the grace of God. My gospel doesn't matter. The word gospel means good tidings, the announcement of good information that people should be glad to hear.

And it is from God. It is about Jesus. It is about the kingdom.

It is about God's grace. All of these things are part of the gospel that Paul preached and that Jesus preached. Once again, I want to say, as I did yesterday, many people try to draw some sharp dichotomy between Christ's teaching and Paul's, as if Paul changed or innovated something in the gospel different than what Jesus preached.

I've done my own analysis of this and I can't find a dime's worth of difference between what Jesus preached and what Paul did. Every major doctrine Jesus preaches is in Paul. Every major doctrine Paul preaches is in Jesus.

It's just like, I made a list once of like 20 major doctrines, major emphases, and where Jesus taught it and where Paul taught it. People try to give you the impression that they see something that sort of sets Paul off into the almost heretical category, but there's no substance to such arguments at all. The gospel is the message that Christians have for the world.

And verse 2 begins with the word which, meaning the gospel, which... Now what he's going to say in the next few verses are things about the gospel. He says, which he promised before through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. Okay, the first thing he says about the gospel is it is not a novelty.

It was anticipated. It is something that didn't just show up out of left field and now you're just supposed to accept it, even though it's quite contrary to everything else you should have expected. No, this is exactly what God has always been saying in the law and the prophets, which have been around for centuries.

And many people did, especially Jews, found Paul to be at odds with what they understood to be the Mosaic Covenant. But the law and the prophets are the Mosaic Covenant. And he says that the gospel I'm preaching was promised.

It wasn't, you know, expounded much. It wasn't explained. It wasn't realized fully, but it was promised in the prophets of the Holy Scriptures.

Now, this is very important. Jesus, you know, in the Sermon on the Mount, anticipated that some of his teaching might be interpreted by the Jews as being contrary to Moses and the Old Testament because Jesus touched lepers. He touched dead bodies.

He ate with the wrong kind of people. He did things on the Sabbath that Jews thought shouldn't be done. It seemed to critical observers in the Jewish community that Paul was somehow, I mean, that Jesus, excuse me, that Jesus was somehow undermining the law of Moses.

That's why when they brought the woman taking adultery to Jesus, they said Moses said we should stone her. What do you say? Trying to get him to sort of make a, you know, commit himself to be saying something different than what Moses said. They knew Jesus wasn't the type to throw stones at prostitutes and sinners.

He ate with them on a regular basis. He knew they, he's a friend of sinners. So they were pretty sure he wasn't going to say stoner because that wasn't the way he was toward people like that.

But if he said something else, they could say he's undermining Moses. Just what we thought Moses said to stoner. He said, don't.

And of course, Jesus brilliantly, you know, answered without compromise and without getting himself into trouble. You know, whoever's without sin, cast the first stone, essentially upholding Moses. Okay, stoner.

But make sure you don't throw, the person who throws the first stone better not be as guilty as she is. So she didn't get stoned after all. So, I mean, Jesus is brilliant.

But the point here is that that whole encounter was intended to try to underscore or reveal that Jesus was at odds with the law. Now what Jesus actually said in the Sermon on the Mount, knowing that people might think such things about him, he said, do not think that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy them, but to fulfill them.

Now, what's the difference between destroying them and fulfilling them? Some people make the mistake of saying, Jesus is saying I didn't come to destroy them, but to retain them as they are. And therefore they take Jesus' statement. I didn't come to destroy the law.

See, we're supposed to be under the law. We should keep the Sabbath. We should keep the dietary rules.

We should do these things because Jesus didn't come to destroy the law. Well, he didn't say, I came to retain it. He said, I came to fulfill it.

And what does that mean? Well, it certainly changes things. And we need to understand it as if the law was the promise. And what Jesus brought was the fulfillment of that promise, the keeping of that promise.

That's what Paul said. The gospel I'm preaching was promised in the Old Testament. It's as when a child is born, a child is a promise of an adult someday.

That's what you expect when you have a baby. You say, okay, this is a little child. We expect someday we'll have a grown child.

The existence of a human child is predicting a human adult someday. A child's supposed to grow up and be an adult. Tragically, some don't reach that stage, but if they don't, that's an anomaly.

The very existence of a child is the promise of an eventual adult. Now, when that child becomes an adult, has that child been destroyed? No, the child still lives, but he's not a child anymore. He's been fulfilled.

He's not been killed. He hasn't been destroyed or obliterated. He's been brought into the fullness of what he was supposed to be all along, what he was supposed to become.

And that's how it is with the law. The law was like a childhood. Paul uses that illustration in Galatians.

He says we're children under the law. But when the time came appointed by the Father, we received adult status, which he means when we came to Christ. There's an immaturity in the legalism of the law, but it's an immaturity that predicted or anticipated what Paul and Jesus preached.

And so Paul is saying, if you think that I'm an enemy of the law, and certainly many things Paul said, even later in Romans, gave some people the impression that he might, in fact, be against the law. He even had to address the rhetorical question, is the law sin then? And he said, certainly not. But why would anyone even suggest that? Because some things he said might be misunderstood to mean that.

So he starts right out at the beginning. He says, what I am preaching is not novel. It's not against the law.

It was promised in the prophets. I just want you to know right from the beginning, the gospel is not 100% new. It's just a new development of something that God has had in the works since the days of the law and the prophets.

It is the fulfillment of those. Now, you'll find that both the law and the prophets are mentioned later on in Romans as being behind it. For example, behind the gospel, because he says in Romans 1.17, he says, for in it, and here it is the gospel also, in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

Now, the quote is from Habakkuk 2.4, the prophets. What's he talking about? He's talking about how in the gospel, justification by faith is revealed, just like it said in Habakkuk. So, he's just demonstrated that his gospel is predicted in the prophets.

Later on, at the end of chapter 3, in verse 31, the last verse of chapter 3 of Romans, Paul says, do we then make void the law through faith? And by that, he means by preaching justification by faith, have we somehow been, have we made the law meaningless or worthless or have we nullified it? He says, contrary, certainly not. On the contrary, he says, we establish the law. Now, once again, people often mistakenly think that Paul, like Jesus, they think, was saying, we have to keep the law.

Paul said, we don't make the law void, we establish the law, therefore we should be keeping Saturday Sabbath and doing all these other Jewish things. Seventh-day Adventists and other Sabbatarian types use this all the time. Paul said, we don't make void the law, we establish it.

That means, they think it means, that we keep the law, but no, that's not what he means. The chapter division is artificial. Paul didn't put it in there.

The next line, after he says, we establish the law, he gives an example from the law, that is, from the Torah. The law or the Torah to the Jew is the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis. And so, he takes something from the Torah.

He says, what then shall we say that Abraham, our father, has found? And he quotes verse three, what does it say in the scripture? What scripture? Genesis 15-6. Where is that? That's in the law. That's in Torah.

Abraham believed God, it was accounted for righteousness. Notice, he was justified or accounted righteous by believing or by faith. So, Paul has established from the law and earlier, in chapter one, verse 17, from the prophets, that justification by faith is not something Paul's making up.

The law said it about Abraham and the prophets said it. So, when Paul said, we establish law, what he means is when we preach justification by faith, we are saying the same thing that the law said when it said this about Abraham, are we not? We're establishing that the law is true. Not that all the law code is still to be followed, but we are saying something that can be established from the very writings that we call the Torah, the law.

And so, Paul is very emphatic about that here, obviously. You're going to see it also in chapter three, in verse 21. Because in chapter three, verse 21, Paul says, but now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, that is the ability to be righteous without keeping the Jewish law, is revealed being witnessed by the law and the prophets.

Once again, he's saying this justification, which is by faith apart from keeping the law of Moses, that justification, that righteousness is witnessed to, again, in the law and the prophets. So, Paul is very emphatic. What he's preaching comes right on the heels of the law and the prophets as the fulfillment, as the keeping of a promise.

It says in Romans 1, 2, the gospel was promised before by his prophets in the Holy Scriptures, the Old Testament. So, in Romans 1, once he has mentioned the gospel at the end of verse 1, he makes some statements about it. The first one is in verse 2, which is that the gospel he's preaching is no innovation, it's no novelty, it is that which any Jew who is aware of what the law and the prophets were saying would have picked up on, but very few did.

The second thing he says about the gospel has to do with its contents. Verse 3 also is continuing to talk about the gospel. He says it's concerning his son.

The gospel is a message concerning his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Now, all these words are important. God's son.

God's son, Jesus. God's son, Jesus Christ. God's son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

All of these are essential to the gospel. To believe that Jesus is the son of God, that he's not a mere man, he came from heaven. To believe that it's this man, Jesus, a historical character, not someone else, not some Christ essence or aeon that the Gnostics would later talk about or that New Age people might talk about, you know, the Christ consciousness in us all.

No, this is a historical character, Jesus. He's the Christ. What's the Christ mean? The word Christ is Greek for Messiah.

Messiah is a Hebrew word or an Anglicized version of the Hebrew word, Mashiach, and Christ is an Anglicized word of the Greek translation of that, Christos. Both words, Messiah and Christ, mean the anointed one and it specifically refers to the anticipated king. Jewish kings were anointed at their inauguration with oil.

That he was the anointed one. He's anointed to be the king and the priest. Priests were also anointed in their inauguration.

The Messiah would be the anointed one, especially his kingly role is the emphasis. His priestly role is somewhat secondary, but that is in the Old Testament revelation. In the Old Testament, there's not a lot said about his being a priest except in Psalm 110, verse 4, you're a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

No explanation of that, but there's many places in the Old Testament that talk about the Messiah as a king, the anointed king. And it's saying that this... When you say Christ, we sometimes just think of it as like Jesus' last name or something, Jesus Christ, but in fact, in the first century, when they said Jesus is Christ, of course, it's a title and the title means it's just full of Old Testament information. Behind the word Christ or Messiah is the whole understanding.

This person is not just an amazing guy who happened to show up one day. This is a guy who was predicted and many things were said about him before he was ever born. His arrival here is the fulfillment of the dream and the vision that God gave to all of Israel of a coming king who would bring salvation to them.

That's what the word Christ means. That's what Messiah means. So instead of just thinking of it as sort of like a title like Jesus' last name or something, we have to realize that when Paul or anyone else said Jesus is the Christ, that's pregnant with meaning from the Old Testament, messianic hope.

He's the fulfillment of the hopes of Israel and of the nations. And so this is our gospel that Jesus is the son of God. It's the man, Jesus, born in Bethlehem, the historical individual from Nazareth.

He is the Messiah and he is our Lord. And by Lord, of course, this is an outgrowth of the word Messiah because a Messiah is a king and a king and a Lord are similar in their roles. A king obviously is a ruler of a country who has subjects and so we're his subjects in his kingdom.

But a Lord usually refers to a master of a household who has slaves. So if you have a Lord, you're like a slave. Remember Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6, you're not your own, you've been bought with a price.

That's a slave image. I've been purchased to be the slave of Christ. Now Christ doesn't call me his servant.

He calls me his friend, but I truly am his slave. I've been purchased, I'm owned, I belong to him. And Jesus does say in Luke 6.46, he says, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and you don't do what I say? It doesn't make sense for you to call someone Lord and not act like a slave because that's what you are if you have a Lord.

So, and by the way, the proclamation that Jesus is Lord is the central proclamation of the early church. They didn't have, right at the beginning, a real elaborate statement of faith. Eventually the Apostles' Creed took several Christian doctrines and put them together, though it was not as elaborate as some later creeds were.

But the very earliest Christian creed was simply Jesus is Lord, or Jesus is King. Jesus is Messiah, it means King. And so Paul said, this is the gospel message.

It's about Jesus. Notice it's not about me. I only come into it under the word our.

Our Lord. I'm one of the ones that he's the Lord of. But the gospel is not a story about me.

It's not about what God has given me. It's not about what happens to me after I die. It's not, I mean, not that those things aren't aspects that come into the story.

They are. But the gospel is a message. It's proclaiming Jesus.

It's not proclaiming heaven, for example. You'll never find Jesus or the Apostles putting the idea of going to heaven after you die as the central image of any of their gospel preaching. It's not absent from their thinking, but it's just not what it's about.

They're not trying to advertise Jesus as a, this is good for you folks, come on in and get yourself a good deal. It's rather, there's a king now, another king, one Jesus, and God commands everyone everywhere to bow the knee to him and submit to him, and then you can be saved. If we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised from the dead, we'll be saved, Paul said in Romans 10, 9. It's professing Christ as Lord.

It's by having a Lord that I have a Savior. He is the only Savior who happens to also be a Lord. And you don't have a Savior if you don't have a Lord, because if you don't have a Lord, you don't have Jesus.

You can't have Jesus without having a Lord, because he is a Lord. So if you don't have Jesus, you're not saved. So you get a Lord and Savior at the same moment.

When you profess Christ as Lord and submit to that reality, you are now in his kingdom, you're now in his family, you're now born again, you're now saved. And that is the gospel. The gospel is the message of putting Jesus out there as the, he's Jesus Christ, he's our Lord, but there's more.

Still about Jesus. We're not talking about anything but Jesus here. Who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead.

Now, there's two aspects of Jesus that Paul thinks we have to be quite aware of. One is he's of the seed of David according to the flesh. Why would that matter? That's his credential to be Messiah.

Now, there are many people who were born of David after the flesh. He had a lot of wives and a lot of kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. But the Messiah in particular had to be a son of David.

Most people were not and Jesus was. And so it's important to emphasize that when I say he's the Messiah, you have to realize that his human ancestry came through David. That qualifies him or at least that's a necessary, it may not be a sufficient cause for his Messiahship, but it's a necessary cause and he meets that necessary qualification.

It also focuses on the fact that he was a real human being because the next line is he's the Son of God, which you might have understood him to be some kind of a divine creature, not fully human. One of the gods of Rome or one of the gods of the Greek pantheon would have children who weren't exactly, you know, the sons of Zeus were not exactly human, you know. And yet the Son of God that we're proclaiming is he's got a divine origin because he's the Son of God, but he's also got a human origin.

This idea that the Messiah has two aspects to his origin confused many people. Some of the Jews thought the Messiah would be strictly a human being descended from David and nothing more, just a great hero that God would send a second David to deliver his people Israel from their oppressors. Other Jews had more of a mystical idea of the Messiah being sort of a divine creature that kind of floats down out of heaven, doesn't have real connections to the family line, much at all.

And the truth is, mixes both because he's human and he's divine. And that's what Paul says. He got both sides.

The fact that the Jews didn't quite grasp this sometimes is seen in the fact that when Jesus said to the Pharisees in the final week of his earthly life, he said, what do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he? Remember that? And they said, he's David's son. That was orthodox and true. He is David's son.

But Jesus didn't let him just get away with that. He challenged him. He said, then why did David, speaking through the Holy Spirit, say, Yahweh said to my Lord.

Now, every Jew knew that when David said, my Lord, he was talking about the Messiah. Yahweh was God and Yahweh spoke to David's Lord, the Messiah, and said, sit at my right hand, tell me can I use your fist? Jesus said, now David called the Messiah his Lord. Why do you say he's David's son? You know, a Lord is above somebody.

A son is below his father. How could he be David's son if he's David's Lord? The quote, by the way, is from Psalm 110, verse one. And of course, it sounds like Jesus was denying that the Messiah would be the son of David, but he wasn't denying it.

He's simply saying, you've got half of the picture. Yes, of course, the Messiah is David's son, but there's a half that you're missing entirely. You have to realize that David referred to the Messiah as his Lord, and therefore there's another thing in the identity of the Messiah that is not part of your understanding, but needs to be.

He's descended from David according to the flesh, but he's the son of God and declared to be the son of God according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead. What this means is the Holy Spirit declared Jesus to be God's son by raising him from the dead. The resurrection being, therefore, the proof of Christ's special sonship.

Now we know Jesus was uniquely the son of God, but we're all children of God through him, in him. It says in John 112, as many as received him, to them he gave the power to become the sons of God. So son of God is not a title, or I should say a term used only of Jesus in scripture.

It's used of godly people too, but Jesus' sonship is unique. When we say Jesus is the son of God, we don't mean it the same way as when we say I'm a son of God, you're a son of God. We mean that he is a unique son of God.

He was declared to be by the resurrection from the dead. That was a unique act. Now some people have risen from the dead by God's power, by Jesus' doing.

Jesus raised other people from the dead too, like Lazarus. But Jesus raised himself from the dead. No one else has ever done that.

Jesus said, destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days. He's talking about his body. How can somebody raise himself up from the dead? They're dead.

How can they do anything? Well, only Jesus could do that, and he did it. And the Holy Spirit did it. I mean, the Bible actually attributes Jesus' resurrection to the Father in certain places, and to the Holy Spirit in certain places, and to him.

All three raised Jesus. But the point is, the Holy Spirit bore witness to Jesus being the son of God by raising him from the dead. And the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is said in Scripture to be the demonstration of his sonship.

If you look at Acts chapter 13, Paul is going to quote Psalm 2-7 here. But we don't have to turn to Psalm 2-7 because he quotes it. But in Acts 13, in verse 33, Paul is preaching in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch.

And this is part of his message to the Jews there. He said, God has fulfilled this for us. Let me read the previous verse.

We declare to you the glad tidings. What's another word for glad tidings? Gospel. Good news, good tidings.

So I'm proclaiming the gospel to you. What is the gospel? I'm proclaiming you the glad tidings, that promise which was made to the fathers, God has fulfilled. Now, just notice this.

Paul said that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises that God made to Israel. I say that because there's many people who say that Jesus is not, even though they're Christians. They say that the real fulfillment of the promises of Israel remain in future eschatological events.

The restoration of Israel to the land, the pouring out of his spirit on Israel in the last days. They say that's the fulfillment of the promises. Paul said, no, Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises.

The New Testament teaches that God has fulfilled the promises he made to Israel. And that when people say he hasn't and that there's something else that's supposed to fulfill them, I don't think they're preaching and teaching the same way Paul did. Paul said, the promise which he was made to our fathers, God has fulfilled this for us, their children, in that he has raised up Jesus.

Of course, he's referring to the resurrection. He's raised up Jesus as it is written in the second Psalm. You are my son, today I begotten you.

Now, those last two lines are the second Psalm, Psalm 2-7. You are my son, today I have begotten you. Many people mistakenly think that this is talking about Jesus being begotten in eternity past as part of the Godhead.

But actually, Paul says, no, it's the resurrection of Jesus. God raised him from the dead as it is written in the Psalm here. In other words, this Psalm is going to confirm what Paul said about Jesus being raised from the dead.

God said, you're my son, this day I begotten you. The resurrection of Christ from the dead is the beginning of Christ to a certain status of sonship. He had a status of sonship before, but a different status.

He's the heir of the new creation from the point of his resurrection on. Before that, he was the son of God in the sense that his human existence had been brought about by God impregnating his mother instead of a man doing it. And therefore, he was not the son of Joseph, which he would have been if Joseph had impregnated Mary.

He's the son of God. But that spoke something about his earthly existence as the son of God. But in his resurrection, he's declared to be the divine son, the heir to all things.

And he's declared by the resurrection to be the son of God. And thus, twice in the New Testament beyond this, once by Paul and once by Jesus himself, he is called the firstborn from the dead. Not just the first raised from the dead, the firstborn from the dead, the son.

You are my son, this day I begotten you. He's referred to as the firstborn from the dead in Colossians 118. And he refers to himself.

I believe it's in Revelation 1.5, he refers to himself as the first begotten from the dead. Referring to his being begotten in resurrection in the sense that Psalm 2 meant when it said, you're my son, this day I begotten you. Paul is making it very clear in Acts 13 that Psalm 2 is not talking about any other event than the resurrection.

And we should understand it anyway that way because when people use Psalm 2-7 to speak of some eternity past birth, begottenness of Jesus from God, they are not looking at the wording of the passage. It doesn't say in eternity past I begotten you. It says this day I begotten you.

Orthodox Christian theology is not that Jesus had a day millions of years ago when he came into existence and was begotten by God. Trinitarian theology is that Jesus has always been generated from God and never had a beginning. As long as God existed, Jesus has been generated from him.

Just like as long as the sun has been in the sky, light beams have been coming from it. In other words, the light beams have their origin in the sun, but there aren't any newer than the sun. The exact moment the sun began to shine, those beams were there.

The beams are co-eternal with the sun if the sun was eternal. Christ is co-eternal with the Father. He's the Word who always was with God and was God.

He became flesh at a certain point in history and was known among us as the Son of God. Some people trying to say that he was begotten in eternity past by using Psalm 2.7 are not noticing. It's not talking about eternity past.

It's talking about a day. That's a point in time. This day I begotten you.

It's Easter Sunday. The first Easter Sunday is that day. It's Resurrection Sunday that Jesus was begotten in the sense that Psalm 2 is talking about.

Paul here refers to that too. He's declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. Now, verse 5. Through him, Christ, and now instead of... We saw that the subject was the gospel in verses 1, 2, and 3. The gospel was promised in verse 2. It was concerning in verse 3. Jesus.

But now that we've talked about Jesus, we're going to talk not about the gospel per se but more about Jesus himself. He was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead after being born of the seed of David according to the flesh. He, through him, we have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all the nations for his name among whom you all are the called of Jesus Christ to all who are in Rome beloved of God called to be saints grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, this opening greeting mentions that Paul has a ministry toward the Roman saints whether they have realized it previously or not and that's because he has an apostleship or he's been sent in verse 5 for obedience to the faith among the nations that is the Gentiles for Christ's name and he makes it clear in verse 6 and that would include you. You are Gentiles among whom you also are. Now, what Paul is saying is I have a commission to be apostle to the Gentiles.

That would include you Romans. You're mostly Gentiles. At least you are a Gentile city predominantly Gentiles.

There were plenty of Jews in the church. That's evident by things he says in the later chapters especially chapter 2. He makes it very clear. He's addressing distinctly the Jews in the church in certain passages.

There were Jews there but the church was in a Gentile city and no doubt was predominantly Gentile. And so, I'm an apostle to Gentiles. I got to come talk to you too because you're Gentiles.

He's saying. Now, notice he does say again here he's an apostle. He had told us that earlier in verse 1 but notice he says we have received grace and apostleship.

The grace first. Once again, just as he spoke of his servanthood before his apostleship he speaks of his being a recipient of grace before he speaks of his apostleship. Paul is aware that whenever he mentions his apostleship he's making a statement about being a person in real authority that people really ought to listen to and even obey.

But, he realizes too that people who claim such things often are boasting. They're kind of on an ego trip. They're on a power trip.

They're trying to insist that they are important people. And so, when Paul speaks of his apostleship he always wants to preface it I'm actually a slave and I was called to be an apostle. I actually received grace like everybody else.

I'm a recipient of grace. I'm not a great man. I'm a beggar who's received mercy from God and apostleship.

The point he makes is his emphasis is on his being on the same level with the rest of us. He could have just said I'm an apostle, listen to me. If you don't like it, just sit down and shut up.

I'm in charge here. But, what he emphasizes even when he is obliged and finds it necessary to mention his apostleship he wants to first make clear I'm like you. I've received grace just like you have.

And perhaps more than some because I was a worse sinner than you. I'm a servant like you are. A bond servant.

But, I've also received and been called to apostleship. And my apostleship is distinctly directed toward Gentile nations. You might remember that in Galatians chapter 2 Paul tells us that early in his Christian ministry he had a meeting with Peter and James and John in Jerusalem.

And they were trying to decide exactly how his ministry corresponded to theirs. Because he was a newcomer in the apostolic position and they had been around from the beginning. And he says in Galatians 2 that they had an agreement that as Peter and his group would be apostles to the circumcision Paul and his group would be apostles to the uncircumcision.

That is to the Gentiles. Now this may seem strange when you realize that everywhere Paul went, the first place he preached was in the synagogue to the Jews. You might think, well I thought he was supposed to be an apostle to the Gentiles.

How come he's always going to the Jews first? Then to the Gentiles after the Jews kick him out. Well when Paul says that Peter was the apostle to the Jews, the circumcision and Paul the apostle to the uncircumcision, the Gentiles he's not talking so much about ethnic domains as geographic domains. Peter and the other apostles were reaching out to the Judean church where the circumcision the Jews were concentrated.

Paul was reaching out to Asia Minor and Greece and Italy and maybe Spain someday where the Gentiles were. His primary area of ministry was in the Gentile world to the uncircumcision. But that didn't mean he wasn't allowed to preach to Jews too.

And he does preach to Jews in this book. He addresses Jews very directly. But Peter, who was an apostle to the Jews also was the first man to bring an uncircumcised Gentile into the church.

Cornelius. It wasn't Paul that went to Cornelius. It was Peter.

So these men were not in hermetically sealed racial different categories that Peter could only preach to the Jews and Paul only to the Gentiles. But he was, his title was an apostle to the Gentiles. That was his primary field.

And Rome certainly was a very important Gentile city. So he says, among whom you also, that is you Romans are Gentiles many of you. It's a fairly Gentile church with a strong Jewish representation in it.

He says, you also are the called of Jesus Christ. Now he had used this word called, kleitos, back in verse 1, he says that he was called to be an apostle. Now you're also called.

Not necessarily called to be apostles, but you're called, like I am, by Christ, into himself, into his movement, into his kingdom. And he says, to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called, the same word kleitos, to be saints. So not all are called to be apostles like Paul is but all are called to be saints.

The word saint means a holy one. The Greek word is the root word for saint is holy. And a saint is a holy one.

The word sanctify is a verb taken from the same word which means to be made holy. The word holy means set apart. It's very important that we don't misunderstand this word because it has connotations it has come to have connotations that don't really apply.

There are what we call holiness denominations. There are holiness churches, some of which interpret holiness almost entirely in the way you dress and what you don't do. You don't smoke, you don't drink, you don't go to movies, you don't go to dances, you don't chew gum, at least not tobacco, maybe gum, I'm not sure.

You don't wear jewelry, you don't wear makeup, you don't make you know, you just, it's what you don't do is what makes you holy. And that's not what holy means. The word holy primarily does not have anything to do with the way you're dressing or eating or whatever, although it may have ramifications in those areas.

The word holy speaks of a status you have as one who is set apart just for God. Now what you do should be informed by that fact, obviously. If you know that you belong to God and you're set apart from Him, then the choices you make should be consistent with that.

And it may have ramifications on the way you dress and other things, the movies you go to or don't, obviously. How much you drink or if you don't drink, I mean those decisions will of course come out and maybe differently for different people. From the prior knowledge that I've been set apart for God and everything I do is for Him.

Now the word holy therefore is not primarily a reference to actions. It's only secondarily related to actions. The temple was holy.

The furniture in the temple was holy. The cups and the bowls and the spoons in the temple were holy. But they didn't do things, they weren't defined by whether they wore makeup or not.

They were holy because they were set apart for one thing, for God. You couldn't take the temple spoons home and eat your cereal at home with them. I mean other spoons could be used for that but not the temple ones.

The temple ones were set apart. The word holy means set apart. And you are called to be set apart ones.

Saints means those who are set apart. You know the word holy is used in the Old Testament to refer to the animals that were sacrificed. And there's a line in Exodus that says whatever touches the altar is holy.

Any animal that is put on the altar is suddenly holy. It was an ordinary animal before that but it became holy at that point. Which means before you put the animal on the altar if you look at it and say wait I didn't realize this is my kid's favorite lamb.

I'm going to go take that home and bring a different one and offer it because my kid would be heartbroken if I gave it to him. You could do that. As long as it hadn't touched the altar it was an ordinary lamb.

You could do what you wanted with it. When you put it on the altar it was no longer an ordinary lamb. It was belonged to God.

It was consecrated. You couldn't do anything with it except sacrifice it. It was now holy.

Holy means it belongs to God. It can be set apart for God. It cannot be used for anything except for God.

And that's what you are. That's why Paul later on in Romans 12 1 says I beseech you therefore by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God. Which is your reasonable or some translators say spiritual worship.

Your spiritual worship is the presenting of yourself as separated to God like a living animal sacrifice on the altar you now belong to God. All that you have, all that you are, all that you do, it's God. That's what it means to be called to be saints.

That's what Paul says. The Roman Christians are like others. All Christians are.

And then he has this greeting, very typical of his greetings elsewhere. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This exact greeting word for word is found in nine of his epistles.

In the greetings at the beginning of 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians and Galatians and Ephesians and Colossians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians the very same greeting word for word. Now in his pastoral epistles 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, those three epistles it's the same with the addition of another word, mercy. For some reason when he writes to Titus and Timothy he says, grace mercy he says, grace to you and mercy and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus.

So he adds the word mercy in there. In those three epistles. I won't make any significant observations about it because I don't know what would be significant about it.

It's just an observation that nine out of Paul's twelve epistles begin with exactly this greeting. And grace of course, keres in the Greek was a typical greeting that people in this Gentile world used when they'd meet one another. It doesn't mean greetings, but it would be used as more or less the same thing, the same greetings.

Grace grace to you. That would be a very typical, even secular greeting among the Greeks. Now the Jews would greet with the word shalom peace.

Shalom was more the polite greeting among the Jews. And so Paul saying grace and peace in a sense is combining the Greek and the Jewish greeting. And again it may be significant that he put the grace there before the peace.

Because there is no peace until you have grace. You're at war with God until then. Later in Romans chapter 5 verse 1 Paul says being therefore justified by faith we now have peace with God.

So how do we have peace with God? Because we're justified by grace through faith. Justification by grace allows us to have peace with God. Otherwise we are at odds with God.

We're at war with God. So grace once again is probably not accidentally put first. Probably intentionally to indicate that that does come first.

First grace then peace from God and from Jesus. Now that is the end of his greeting. The next several verses up through verse 15 normally would be called the prologue to the book.

Prologue to Romans. He in verse 16 he will begin his discussion of the righteousness of God which is his theme at least of the major portion of the book. The righteousness of God which is what the gospel reveals.

The righteousness of God. But before he addresses the righteousness of God which you can see immediately in chapter 1 verse 16 he raises it for I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God's salvation to everyone who believes for the Jew first also for the Greek for in it the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed and that's where he launches. In verses 16 and 17 he tells us the gospel is about the revelation of the righteousness of God and he launches into the rest of his argument.

But he doesn't launch until then. Prior to that we have in verses 8 through 15 simply a prologue where again it's sort of part of his greeting it's opening up. He's not really launching into his argument yet.

He's speaking more on a personable and personable level. He says first I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world for God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers making request if by some means now at last I may find a way in the will of God to come to you for I long to see you that I may impart to you some spiritual gift so that you may be established that is that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me now I do not want you to be unaware brethren that I have often planned to come to you but was hindered until now that I might have some fruit among you also just as among the other Gentiles I am a debtor both to the Greeks and the barbarians both to the wise and to the unwise so as much as is in me I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also and with that he moves into his argument now let me just speak about this little section he says first I thank my God that's always a good thing to put first Bible says enter into his gates with thanksgiving Thanksgiving is the initial entrance into God's presence into his gates you enter into his courts with praise but Thanksgiving is more of an initial obligation Thanksgiving means you thank God for what he's given you for your benefits what is praise not quite the same thing you praise somebody for their attributes you praise somebody for who they are you thank them for what they do now not everyone knows God well enough to know what he is and to praise him acceptably Christians certainly should be people who praise God because they've known his mercy they've known his grace they've known his bounty they've known you know his provision they've known there's so many things we know about God we found him to be compassionate just faithful when you speak to God about those things you're praising him because those are traits of his somebody who doesn't know God can't exactly praise him because they don't know him well enough but everybody should thank him thanking God everybody has received benefit from God remember Jesus said that God sends his rain on the just and on the unjust and he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good everybody has received benefit from God everyone should thank him thanksgiving is the most fundamental obligation so much so that remember when Jesus healed 10 lepers and said go show yourselves to the priest they were still lepers when they left his presence but on the way they saw themselves healed of their leprosy and nine of them went on to the priest one of them came back and profusely began to thank Jesus for his healing and you know to me when I was a kid reading that story it was always heartwarming that man came back and thanked Jesus he should receive a commendation for doing that Jesus didn't commend him he said only one where's the other nine it's like everybody should be thanking me you know you're thanking me well and good but that's not no special brownie points for that where's the other and they should be doing it too thanks is obligatory if somebody's giving you something wonderful and you don't thank him you're a jerk and that's what the world is who are unthankful to God they're jerks I mean they're really falling short on the most basic civility to receive mercy and good things from God day by day when they're even his enemies and he still gives them good things and they never think to thank him later in Romans 1 when Paul's talking about how society degenerates from one point to a lower point as he early in that downward spiral he says this about in verse 21 about the wicked people says because although they knew God they did not glorify him as God nor were they thankful this is like the beginning of their downfall they didn't have the basic decency even to be thankful to God and there's always something to thank God for and it's a crime not to thank God if you're not thankful the next steps are further down as you will see when we in our next session go through that latter part of chapter 1 Paul says first I thank God it's only appropriate that that's first that's always appropriate I can't always think of something to pray at every moment maybe sometimes I'm not even really eager or mindful to think of something that I can praise God for but there's I can always look around me and see something to thank him for for one thing that I can look around me and I can see some people can't I can see if I have no other blessings than that if I was paralyzed from the neck down but I could open my eyes and see color and beauty and read and see the face of my wife and my children there's people who never open their eyes and see anything they're blind and there's something you can thank God for right off everyone's heard the saying you know I complained that I had no shoes talking about a man who had no feet you know we take for granted so many things we focus on what we don't have and we forget what we do have that some people don't have and thankfulness is such an obligation not because it earns you brownie points but because it is so derelict of duty to fail to be thankful for things that you receive that you don't deserve good things that you're just poured out by your parents everyone should be thankful to their parents because your parents brought you into the world at their expense they raised you at their expense even if they weren't the best parents you could have imagined they could have done worse they could have aborted you they didn't have to keep you alive when you're helpless and young they did they could have done worse and in many cases they've done much better and parents should always be the recipients of abundant thanks to their children even not the best parents spouses give up a great deal for each other even spouses that aren't very good even fairly selfish spouses unless they're the very worst most spouses have made certain sacrifices in order to be live in a household with their spouse and it always means giving up certain liberties certain privacy certain things they would have as single people that they give up and even if in many respects they don't do all the duties they should do as a spouse they're doing more for their spouse than they're doing for anyone else I say that knowing that there are exceptions to that there are people who do more for other people than they do for their spouses but that's not very common even very unideal marriages usually generates a great deal of debt to one another just by living together every spouse has done something in their almost every day for their spouse that they wouldn't do for other people or wouldn't do if they weren't married and after years of that it's amazing when people get divorced they show such ingratitude to the person that they're really most indebted to besides their parents perhaps and God is the one that we're all most indebted to more than our parents more than our spouses God is the one so we have no right ever to be unthankful Paul says I first make sure I give thanks for you we'll talk more after we come back from our break about this section and the rest of chapter one very important things to observe in chapter one that I'm looking forward to but we have to take a break unfortunately