Bible Commentaries
Romans 1

Verses 1-15

PERSONAL PREFACE

Romans 1:1-15

In ancient times letters began as military communications still do, with the formula:

From:

To:

Subject:

Paul addresses not the "church" but "all God’s beloved" in Rome. He does not use the word "church" in this letter till the last chapter, and many interpreters think that chapter 16 did not originally belong with this letter.

For further study, it will be a good project to look through Romans and find what names or expressions Paul uses for Jesus. Here in this short preface, Jesus is referred to as "Christ," as "descended from David," as "Son of God," and as "our Lord." Most remarkable of all is the way Paul puts Christ and God together in his benediction: "Grace . . . and peace from God our Father mid I he Lord Jesus Christ." This is characteristic of Paul’s standpoint throughout his writings. Christ is, together with God, the source of our blessings.

You can also have an interesting time putting together what Paul says about Christians in his short but revealing phrases. The first time they are mentioned, here in Romans, they are described as those who were "called to belong to Jesus Christ."

Paul’s courtesy is more than formal; it is enthusiastic. With one single exception, every one of his letters pays his readers some high compliments. If Paul sometimes exaggerates, his readers probably did not complain of this habit, and neither should we. Their faith had not been proclaimed in China or the Americas, hot they understood what Paul meant. The Christian world had heard of them. Rome was a church and a city "set on a hill," and their light shone far. He compliments them again in 15:14, saying that the Roman Christians are "filled with all knowledge" and that what he wrote was only by way of reminder. But it is clear m the letter itself that he did not mean this literally, and his readers knew oriental courtesy when they heard it.

Paul brings together the different kinds of people who need to have the "good news" of God preached to them: Greeks, barbarians, the wise and the foolish; and also growing Christians. Many Greeks had a high type of religion; "barbarians" generally had low types, and there were wise and foolish people in both classes (1:14-15). Christians need the gospel too. Paul nowhere suggests that his readers were not Christian, or that the first missionaries who started the church at Rome were false teachers. They had been "evangelized"; they had accepted Christ. But evangelism is never quite complete. There is always need to get a better under-standing of the faith we have.

Verses 16-17

THE KEYNOTE: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD

Romans 1:16-17

"I am not ashamed" means of course "I am honored," or in the good sense of pride, "I am proud."

The Christian religion, someone has said, always has to come to us from others. It is not something thought out in solitude. It is news; it is something a man left to himself would not be likely to think up. The Christian religion is not first of all good advice, or good habits, or good thoughts, though it includes all of these. It is first of all, good news.

But there are different kinds of news. Some news is informing but dull; some is entertaining and amusing but not at all important; some is pleasant enough at the time but fatal in the end. Christianity is good news of power. It brings the power of God into life.

Now the "power of God" may be a terrifying thing. It can be shown in ways that blast the beholder. The good news is power "for salvation." What this means will come out in time, for this whole letter is about salvation. A hint is given in the words "righteousness of God." Power, salvation, righteousness—they are all tied together; they are not three separate things, and yet they all either are in the good news or are its results.

But this is true only "through faith for faith." The expression may sound odd and not entirely clear, but one thing is clear: this power, salvation, and righteousness do not "work" without faith. Paul makes no explanation, at the moment, of what these words and ideas mean. He simply gives the readers a broad hint of what his letter is going to deal with, namely, the most important issues there are: God, power, salvation, righteousness, faith, life. Not to ho interested in these is not to take life seriously. What each of these words means will come out, as we said, by degrees, as Paul gets into his theme.

"The righteous shall live by faith" (margin) or "He who through faith is righteous shall live"; which is it? The Greek can he translated either way. The first translation used to be the stand­ard one; now it is the fashion to use the second translation. They both mean that faith is the foundation of the "righteous" man’s life. No righteousness without faith; no true life without faith. At this point we need only say that both translations are true, though Paul’s meaning is better expressed by "The righteous shall live by faith" than by a literal translation of Habakkuk 2:4, which would be "The just man shall live by his faithfulness." Paul will come back to this point often.

Verses 18-32

GOD’S WRATH AND MAN’S SIN

Romans 1:18 to Romans 3:20

What Sin Is and Does 1:18-34

Sin as Idolatry

The Christian doctrine of sin is all here in a nutshell. While names of sins and fashions in sins change, sin is always essen­tially the same in the twentieth century or the first. It begins (1:18-23) with setting up some idol in the place of God. What­ever you can’t live without, that is your god. Whatever takes first place with you, whatever you try to please first of all, whatever you sacrifice everything else for, that is your idol.

Once you try to please someone or something instead of the one true God, you are on the downhill road. How far down that road can go, Paul’s terrible description in chapter 1 will tell you. He was not making this up; it was a description of life in Corinth, from which he was writing, or in Rome, or in any pagan city in any century.

Paul never says that God has sent or will send people to hell for these or other sins. He says something more terrible: "God gave them up." He just took his hand away and let men do as they pleased. He let them create their own hell, living in the world they preferred to his world.

"Well," someone says, "how could God blame the heathen? They didn’t know any better."

Paul’s answer to that is a short one: they were without excuse, because God’s power and deity (Godhood) have been clearly per­ceived in the things he has made. In other words, the creation speaks to us of its Creator. To take for a god anything less than the Creator is to take the fatal wrong turning.

Sin as Disobedience

Sin cannot be understood apart from God. No atheist can un­derstand sin. Communists do not speak of "right" and "wrong" so much as of "correct" and "incorrect," meaning "what Commu­nism prescribes" and "what Communism forbids." But sin is going against—not a party, not the neighbors, not one’s own character or best interests, though it is that, too; sin at its core is going against God. This can take place at different levels. Paul does not blame the heathen for not believing in Christ, or for not accepting the Jewish law. He does say they are to blame because they were not faithful to what they could know of God. Sin furthermore involves a false start (loyalty to less than the High­est); a wrong road (the way of sin); and a missed goal (coming short of the glory of God).

The Locus of Sin

Where in human life shall we look for the center of sin? Is it in the body, in its instincts, the "ape and tiger" in us? Is it pri­marily in the sex instinct? Such questions have often been an­swered in a lump by saying the "locus" or special location of sin is in the physical body, while the soul or spirit is in itself free from sin. But a study of the lists of actual sins mentioned by Paul here and elsewhere (for instance, in Galatians 5) shows that sins of the mind and/or spirit are named right along with sins of the "flesh." Indeed, as we shall see, "flesh" in Paul’s thought does not mean flesh-and-blood, as a rule, but is a name for all the anti-God tend­encies and desires in a man; indeed, in Paul "flesh" is sometimes used for what is not fleshly, solid-fleshly, at all. The real locus of sin is in the self, net exclusively in the physical body.

The Consequence of Sin

The consequence of sin—as we have seen—is just sin. The worst penalty for sin is to fall deeper and deeper into it. The worst penalty for sin is to love sin; it is to reach the point where one can no longer tell good from evil. A person can be "adjusted" to sin as he can be to cocaine. People have been "adjusted" to crime; but these are the most dangerous criminals. Whole societies and nations, indeed, have become adjusted to sin, and have thus brought untold disasters on the world. A person who really prefers sin to God, who prefers his own wishes to God’s will, does not realize how low he has fallen.

Paul uses a strong word, which he did not invent: the wrath of God. This is not vengefulness, not anger; it is nothing like human rage. What Paul means is summed up in those two expressions, "against" (1:18) and "gave ... up" (1:24, 26, 28). Think—the su­preme Power in the universe, against what you are doing, deter­mined that you shall fail! The supreme Power leaving you to yourself in silent scorn.