Letter to Christians in Rome: Introduction (pt 2 of 4)

We are just beginning to look at Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome. I explained in my last post that this letter is written more as a religious treatise than just an ordinary letter. Paul knew this was going to the heart of the Roman Empire, so he took extra pain to “polish” his explanation of the faith.

The theme is almost entirely about God’s “salvation” and needs a little explanation to our modern minds. You see, Paul was brought up under the rigid Jewish Law, at least their legalistic traditions regarding those Laws, and in his mind, God was pre-eminently the God of Righteousness and moral perfection. In our modern days, when the majority of people view God as a vague, easy-going, Grand-fatherly, Benevolence, it is difficult to appreciate the force of Paul’s problem, or the wonder of its solution.

To our modern minds we don’t need to be “saved.” Saved? From what. Years ago someone began displaying signs, “I found it!” (referring to salvation), but the usual response was, “I never lost it.”

Well, as J.B. Phillips wrote:

“If we are prepared to grant the absolute moral perfection of God, eternally aflame with positive goodness, truth and beauty, we can perhaps understand that any form of sin or evil cannot approach God without instant dissolution. This is as inevitable as, for example, the destruction of certain germs by the light of the sun.

“How then, asks Paul, can man who has failed and, moreover, sinned deliberately, ever approach God or hope to share in His timeless existence?”

Well, the Father of Creation offered the Law as the first approach. If you could completely obey the Laws of God, then you would be absolutely free of all moral taint and would be able to approach Him safely and without fear of retribution. But unfortunately, as Paul explains quite plainly and at some length, men have failed to keep either the Law revealed to the Hebrews or the universal moral law of human conscience. This is what the Creator wanted to prove to men. You see, not only have they broken those laws, there was absolutely nothing they could do to remove their guilt. The Law, which was supposed to be a “sign post” pointing the way to God, became nothing but a warning notice. This was the crux of Paul’s problem.

The heart of the Gospel is that God Himself meets this deadlock by a personal visit to this world. It is what He had in mind ever since Adam’s first act of treason. God, as Jesus Christ, became a man, and deliberately accepted the eventual consequences of evil, namely, suffering and death. So, any person who sincerely entrusts their life to Christ can now be accepted by God—by virtue of God’s personal act of atonement. Salvation, or being safe from the horrible long-term consequences of sin and safe in the presence of God’s utter Holiness, now becomes an matter of “believing” and not “achieving.”

This is all worked out in Paul’s letter to the Christian in Rome!

If interested, you can download the entire study of The Letter to Christians at Rome

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