The Letter That Changed the World

All Scripture is inspired, yet some portions of God’s Word are especially known for their transformative impact. Today, Sinclair Ferguson turns to the book that may have influenced the history of the church more than any other.

Welcome to another week on Things Unseen, and especially if this is the first time you’ve listened. Here, each weekday, we reflect on topics that we think are important for our Christian faith and life. And although we’re certainly unseen to one another, I think we’re bound together by the grace of Christ and His ministry to us and by our desire to reflect on the teaching of God’s Word.

And speaking of His Word, I wonder if you have a favorite book in the Bible. My guess is that there are several competitors here for our affections. I know we might want to ask if this is actually a proper question to ask. After all, isn’t all Scripture breathed out by God? Should we prefer one part of it to another? Well, at least it’s clear that there are some parts of Scripture that were more significant for Jesus, and for that matter, for Paul, than some other parts. So, while all Scripture is God-breathed, it’s got mountain peaks, and that brings us to this week’s theme: Paul’s letter to the Romans.

By any canon of judgment, it’s a mountain peak, one of the soaring peaks of the Himalayas. Some would say it’s actually the Mount Everest of the Bible. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I probably should admit that Romans is not actually my own favorite book in the Bible, so I’m not trying to persuade you to make it yours, but it’s surely the most important book or letter that the Apostle Paul ever wrote, and it’s arguably the book that’s had more influence on the history of the church than any other.

Think back to the way Saint Augustine describes his conversion in his Confessions. Remember how, when deeply exercised spiritually, he was sitting in a garden and overheard a child’s voice saying, “Tolle lege—pick it up and read it.” And he picked up the New Testament and read Romans 13:14: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its lust.” Now, that was, of course, just a single moment in God’s saving work in his life, but his influence in the Western world has actually been incalculable, so you might say that the whole course of Western history has been influenced by the impact of that one verse in Paul’s letter to the Romans.

And we’re all familiar with the story from the sixteenth century of the Augustinian monk who was struggling with a burden of guilt despite the enormous efforts he made to please God, the monk who was terrified of the righteousness of God because he was so conscious of his sin and inability to make any compensation for it that would relieve his conscience. He actually wrote that he hated Paul’s words about the righteousness of God being revealed in the gospel. And then he had his breakthrough, and light dawned. This was the righteousness of God in Christ by which he counted sinners righteous because Christ had died and risen for them, and He—and not Martin Luther—had borne God’s judgment. And Luther said he felt as though the gates of paradise had been flung open and that he’d been born again. And the rest, as they say, is history, although you’ll maybe remember that it seems to have been Galatians, and not Romans, that Luther called after his wife, his “Katie.”

Perhaps like Augustine or Luther, there’s a section or a verse in Romans that has actually changed your life, either because you’ve been converted through it or because it’s been the means of progress in your Christian life or perhaps been a comfort to you in a difficult period.

But for this week, I want to ask you a question. If someone were to say to you, whether a Christian or a non-Christian, “What’s in Romans? What’s that letter about? What does Paul say?” I wonder if we’d be able to give a half-decent answer, or, as is sometimes true of us, isn’t it, we know only a few verses or passages here and there. In one way, that would mean that what Paul was wanting to say in writing to the Romans wasn’t so important to us as the scattered gems that we’d found valuable in our own lives. Now, of course, God wants to bless us through individual verses, but don’t you think He wants us to be blessed by the whole of Romans, by its basic message?

Well, it actually divides fairly neatly into four main sections, so looking at them one by one is going to be our task on this week’s editions of Things Unseen. I hope you’ll join me for the rest of the week to take what will be a fairly quick helicopter ride through what is undoubtedly the greatest letter ever written.