Romans--A Little Introduction

Read Romans 1.

            Romans. Romans is clearly Paul’s most important letter, his magnum opus. It’s a tour de force, summarizing his theology and doing it masterfully. Yet, I haven’t taught a Bible study on Romans in over a decade. That’s because it’s also a dense, complicated, difficult book.

            One of the challenges is understanding the letter’s point. I think the usual way we Lutherans think about Romans is that it’s about how a person gets saved. That’s the first of my struggles with Romans. I tend to think that our personal salvation is part of it, but I also think it’s about something bigger than that, and I’ve struggled to articulate what that bigger something is. I think the larger theme is to show how God’s relationship with Israel had always been about God’s plans and purposes for the world. So, just as much as it’s about personal salvation, it’s also about the place of the Gentiles in God’s thoughts and His plans to restore the world to its pre-Fall state and how the church is the vanguard of a new humanity.

            Consider how that is encapsulated in the first 6 verses of the book: God’s Messiah, Jesus, promised through Israel’s Scriptures and Israel’s king, who appointed Paul as an apostle to the Gentiles. Or consider the theme verses of the whole book, 1:16-17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” Two things to note here. First, ‘by faith from first to last,’ or, more literally, ‘from faith to faith.’ I hope to show that this means something along the lines of ‘from the faithfulness of God to the faithfulness of Jesus to our faith in Jesus.: Second, the quotation from Habakkuk, which I think is more than just a simple proof text. I think Paul goes to Habakkuk because Habakkuk is a book in which God is called on to explain His actions and one of the things Paul is trying to do is explain what God has been up to through Israel for the world.

            After this introduction, Paul begins his case by demonstrating that all of humanity was struggling under sin’s curse. He says that the wrath of God is being revealed against the godlessness and wickedness of humanity. The sin of Gentiles is no different than the sin of Israel; as he will say in chapter 3:26, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s the key to this passage; the ‘they’ means all humans, and the description of sin is not just about ‘some’ people. It’s an indictment of all of us.

            Unfortunately, you’ll have to keep reading to hear what God has done about that problem. Hope to see you tomorrow!