Bible Commentaries
Romans 16

Verses 1-23

Personal Greetings (16:1-23)

As we said earlier, some people have been inclined to believe that this chapter must originally have been a part of some other letter to another church. How could Paul know so many people in a church he had never visited? However, the best of the old Greek copies contain this chapter, and it is not at all impossible that Paul had known these people elsewhere. Which of us does not know friends who have moved to great cities far away? The reader is invited not to skim these names but to read the list with care. A good deal about Paul himself comes out here. This is no pompous religious professional, no cold scholar interested only in professors, but a true man who treasures every friend he makes.

Verses 25-27

To God Be the Glory (16:25-27)

This long letter ends with a Hallelujah, a doxology of praise to God. If we did not have other letters from Paul’s later life, we might wonder whether as an old man, ill and poor and in jail, he would not suffer from disappointment and disillusionment, and end his days in a different spirit from this. For the hopes and prayers of this letter were not all to be fulfilled. He did reach Je­rusalem, but from that point on nothing went according to plan—his plan, that is. He was nearly assassinated there, and was never a free man again, except perhaps for a short time near the end of his life. He did reach Rome, but not in triumph. He came to that city in chains, a prisoner. So far as the New Testament tells us, he never set eyes on Spain.

Nevertheless, feeble and old, with prospects for his future dim and grim, he never lost the sense of the grace of the Lord Jesus and the glory of God. He lived the life he commended, bearing witness, by his own life of faith and triumphant joy, to the truth of what he taught. Through the centuries his witness has been multiplied beyond counting, as Christians around the world have rediscovered with Paul the measureless glory and the overflowing grace of God in Christ.