Dr. Sproul discusses the use of "bondservant" by Paul and the meaning of the phrase "gospel of God" and its relationship to the Scriptures. Paul's use of the Trinity is discussed by Dr. Sproul. The introduction starts the discussion of being called and what that calling is.

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. Through Him we have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations for His name, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ;

To all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Please be seated.

The Impact of Romans

On the first page of my Greek testament of Romans, I have scribbled at the top of the page a few significant dates. The first one is the year AD 386. In the latter part of the fourth century, there was a young man whose father was a pagan and whose mother was a devout Christian, but he devoted his youthful years to immorality. He had already sired one illegitimate son, yet his mother continued to pray for his soul and sought the counsel of her pastor, Bishop Ambrose of Milan.

The young man was pacing one day in a garden where there was a copy of the New Testament chained to a lectern. As he was walking, he overheard children playing in the grass, and they were singing a refrain to one of their childhood games. The words were “tolle lege, tolle lege,” which literally meant “take up and read.”

The young man’s name was Augustine of Hippo, Aurelius Augustine. He went to the Scriptures there in the garden, and he allowed the volume of sacred writ to fall open where it would. It happened, in the providence of God, to fall to a passage in Romans 13. Augustine’s eyes fell on this passage:

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Rom. 13:11–14, ESV)

As Augustine read these words, the Spirit of God took the words and pierced between joint and sinew, bone and marrow, to the very depths of the young man’s soul. By the power of the Word of God with the Spirit attending it, Augustine was converted to the Christian faith, and we know him today as Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Later in church history, in the year 1515, an Augustinian monk who had diligently pursued his doctoral studies in the works of Augustine was consigned to the University of Wittenberg to be the professor of biblical studies. He had already delivered his first series of lectures on the book of Psalms, and now his task was to teach his students the book of Romans.

As he was preparing his lectures on Romans and studying the first chapter of this epistle, he found a notation from an ancient manuscript of Saint Augustine defining the righteousness of Christ. Augustine said, as we will see when we look at that text, that when Paul speaks of the righteousness of God in the first chapter of Romans, it is not that righteousness by which God Himself is righteous, but that righteousness He freely gives to those who put their trust in Christ.

For the first time in his life, Martin Luther, whose conscience had been wounded by the burden of the law of God that daily exposed his relentless guilt, said in his own commentary on Romans that for the first time he understood the gospel of Christ, and the doors of paradise swung open, and he walked through. It was from Paul’s teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith alone that Luther stood against the whole world in the sixteenth-century Reformation.

Another date I have in my testament here is the year 1738, when a man who was already ordained to the ministry in the Anglican church in England was listening to a message being delivered outside in London at Aldersgate. He mentioned later that as he was listening to the words of the text of Romans, he felt his heart strangely warmed, and he said that was the moment of his authentic conversion, the conversion that defined the life and ministry of John Wesley for the rest of his days.

I could mention the impact of Romans on John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and a host of others throughout church history. But as we come to it now together, I remind you that God has richly blessed those people who have devoted themselves to the study of this book.

Paul, a Slave of Christ

With those words of introduction, let us begin with the text itself. It begins: “Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.” I have never been satisfied with that English translation of that second clause. In some translations, it simply says, “Paul, a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.” That is far worse, and “bondservant is an improvement on “servant.” I think the proper translation should read, “Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ,” because the word Paul used when he wrote this epistle is the Greek word doulos, and a doulos was not a hired servant who could come and go as he pleased. A doulos was a person who was purchased. Once he was purchased, he became the possession of his master.

Where you see the idea of a doulos in Scripture, you usually see it connected to another descriptive word, kyrios. If you have a Roman Catholic background or know about sacred music in church history and high church liturgy, you may have heard of the Kyrie: “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.” What does that mean? “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

The supreme title given to Jesus in the New Testament, as we see in Philippians 2, is the title kyrios. It translates the Old Testament word Adonai, which means “sovereign One.” That name was reserved for God in the Old Testament.

When you see the title lord or kyrios in the New Testament, there are three ways in which it is used. There is a simple, common way that somebody could be called kyrios, just like calling them “sir” as a polite form of address. That is the lowest use of the term. The supreme use of the term kyrios refers again to the sovereign God who rules all things. That title is the name above every name given to Jesus because He is called by the Father the King of kings and the Lord of lords. But there is a middle level usage of the term kyrios in the New Testament that is used to describe someone who is a slaveowner. In this case, it aptly describes Jesus.

This is how Paul gives his identity: “Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ.” Not just a servant, but a slave. As Paul taught later, saying to the church as a whole and to the individual believer: “You are not your own. You’ve been bought with a price. You’ve been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ.”

Here is the paradox and the irony: When the New Testament describes our condition by nature, by birth as fallen people, we are described as slaves to sin. We are by nature in bondage to sin, bondservants of the flesh, and the only remedy for that according to the New Testament is to be liberated by the work of the Holy Spirit, for where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. So, everyone who is born of the Spirit is set free from slavery. When Christ sets you free from slavery to the flesh, He calls you to the royal liberty of being a slave to Him. That is what we mean when we call Him “Master.” We are acknowledging that in Him, we get our marching orders. He is the Lord of our lives. We are not our own. We are not autonomous. We are not independent. Beloved, unless you understand your relationship to Christ in these terms, you may remain unconverted.

Lord and Master

In the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a theological controversy that exploded in evangelical circles, particularly in that circle of the Christian community that embraced dispensationalism. This was called the “Lordship Salvation Controversy.”

The Lordship Controversy centered around those who were teaching and preaching that you can receive Jesus as Savior, but not as your Lord, and still be a Christian. In other words, they taught that you could be a carnal Christian, a disobedient person without any real change having taken place in your life or behavior, but you are justified by the faith and trust that you put in Jesus as your Savior. Of course, they encouraged you to embrace Jesus as Lord as well, but they did not believe that was necessary for salvation.

That teaching is a pernicious distortion of the biblical gospel, and it gave multitudes of people assurance of salvation who were not saved. There is no such thing as a carnal Christian in the sense of somebody who is completely in the flesh. A person cannot go to Christ as Savior and say, “Save me, but I’m going to live my own life the rest of time, and I’ll do what I want to do.” No, those who come to the cross, who fall on their face before Jesus, who trust in His work of redemption alone also yield to Him as the Master over their lives.

The Apostle Paul knew no dichotomy between Christ as Savior and Christ as Lord, and he makes it clear in the very first sentence of Romans: “Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle.” That is a significant affirmation about himself and his mission.

Called as an Apostle

When we studied the early chapters of Acts, we saw that when the church gathered to elect a new Apostle, they set forth the criteria for Apostleship in the early church. The first criterion for membership in the rank of the Apostolate was to be a disciple of Jesus during His earthly ministry. Secondly, one had to be an eyewitness of the resurrection. Thirdly and most importantly, one had to be commissioned by Jesus directly and immediately under His authority and appointed by Christ to be His Apostle.

At one time during His ministry, Jesus sent out seventy disciples. So, there were far more disciples than the Twelve. Not all of those who were disciples became Apostles. We tend to use those words interchangeably, as if saying “twelve disciples” and “twelve Apostles” meant the same thing. No, a disciple is a learner, a student. Jesus was a rabbi, and enrolled in His school were many disciples. But of that group, He only chose twelve to be elevated to the rank of Apostle, and to be an Apostle means to be commissioned to speak for the Master.

In the ancient world, an apostle was like an ambassador who could speak on behalf of a king, and his message would carry with it the stamp of the authority of the one who sent him. The word apostolos in Greek means simply “one who is sent.” Do you remember what Jesus said to His Apostles? “He who receives you receives Me” (Matt. 10:40). The inverse would also be true: “He who does not receive you does not receive Me.”

In our day, people often say, “I like to hear what Jesus said; it’s Paul I don’t want to listen to.” But we do not know anything about Jesus except what was written about Him by other Apostles, and saying something like that is setting Paul against Matthew or Paul against John. You cannot do that because the Apostles all carried the authority of Jesus Himself. That is what it means to be an Apostle. That is why the New Testament church is built on the foundation of the Apostles (Eph. 2:20).

According to the criteria set out in the early chapters of Acts, Paul failed the first two tests. He was not a disciple of Jesus during Jesus’ tenure on earth, nor was he an eyewitness of the resurrection of Christ. That is why some in the early church challenged the Apostolic authority of Paul. But the supreme qualification for Apostolic authority was to be called directly and immediately by Jesus. Three times in the book of Acts, Luke repeats the account of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, where Christ stopped him in his tracks and commissioned him to be His Apostle. He is reminding the people that Paul is an authentic agent of revelation. He speaks with the authority of Jesus.

So, Paul sets forth his Apostleship right at the beginning of Romans: “Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ. But I have a call. I have been called and set apart as an Apostle.”

God’s Own Gospel

The next word Paul uses is “separated.” The Latin there is “segregated,” cut apart from the multitude to a specific, sacred, consecrated, task. That to which Paul was separated was “the gospel of God.” That is what the entire epistle to the Romans is going to be about: the gospel of God. But there is something significant in this first line of Romans that we could read many times and miss.

When Paul says that he was set apart and consecrated, sanctified as an Apostle for the gospel of God, the phrase he uses involves a part of speech in the Greek language, the genitive, which indicates possession. So, when Paul says that he is separated to the gospel of God, he is not saying, “I’m commissioned to announce a message or good news about God,” but rather: “The gospel to which I have been separated and called to proclaim is God’s gospel. He’s the author of it. He’s the owner of it. I am simply the messenger who is called and set apart to proclaim to people a message that comes from God Himself.”

If I said to you, “I have some great news for you,” that would pique your interest. But if I said, “This great news comes from God Himself,” then you may at first blush think I’m insane, and upon second thought come to the solid conclusion that I am indeed insane. But if you thought for a moment that I were sober in such a statement, that I really did have a message from God Himself, good news, would you not want to hear it?

That is what Paul is saying before he begins to unfold the gospel, before he spells out all the doctrines of grace in his epistle. He says: “I’ve been commissioned to proclaim God’s gospel, the gospel that belongs to Him. It’s His possession, and I’m going to communicate it to you.”

The Promised Gospel

Notice what Paul says next. He has been “separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures.” Let me pause there for a moment. Sometimes we tend to have an artificial separation or distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament. We talk about the Old Testament as law and the New Testament as gospel as if there were no law in the New Testament and no gospel in the Old Testament.

Paul is saying at the very beginning, on the front page of Romans: “The gospel I’m going to teach you in this letter is not a novelty. It’s not a new insight that I came up with when I had to decide on a thesis for my Ph.D. dissertation.” Paul is saying, “No, this gospel to which I have been separated is the same gospel that was promised before.”

The promise of which Paul speaks was repeated many times in the Old Testament. In fact, the first time the gospel was promised, it was promised in the context of a curse. After the fall, God cursed Adam, cursed Eve, cursed the ground, and cursed the serpent. God told the serpent that he would be on his belly and that the seed of the woman would crush his head, and in the process, the seed of the woman would bruise His own heel.

Centuries and centuries before Christ was delivered to the cross, where He crushed the head of Satan while at the same time being bruised for our iniquities, the gospel of Christ was contained in the promise of the curse of the enemy. We call that the protoevangelion, the first proclamation of the gospel.

The Authority of Scripture

Paul is aware of the first proclamation of the gospel as an expert student of the Old Testament, and he says that God promised this gospel “before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures.” “The sacred writings” is the literal phrase Paul uses here, and we need to pay attention to this.

I heard a professor say not too long ago that when Billy Graham was so successful in his crusades all over America and indeed all over the world, he was famous for holding up the Bible in his hand and saying, “The Bible says . . .” He would quote the Bible and use that as the authority from which he would call people to repent from their sins and embrace Christ. But it was said in the classrooms I attended as a student that the days are over where you can say, “The Bible says,” and expect that statement to have any credibility, primarily because the work of criticism from academicians has been so severe. They have done their job, so to speak, because people have lost confidence in the trustworthiness of sacred Scripture. But God has not lost confidence in the power of the sacred Scriptures.

God has invested the sacred Scriptures with the power of the Holy Ghost. He declared to Isaiah, “My word . . . shall not return to Me void” (Isa. 55:11). When God opens His mouth, the earth melts. One poet put it this way:

Hammer away, ye hostile hands;
Your hammers break, God’s anvil stands.

Paul is not sheepish about where his authority lies with respect to the gospel that God promised before through the prophets in the holy Scriptures. There is no greater source to my mind that gives me more confidence of credibility than the Word of God. I am impressed by rational arguments on certain points that use the power of logic and the formal truth of mathematics. I am impressed when empirical science does due diligence and comes to verify hypotheses in an amazing way. But nothing moves my soul, my heart, and my mind to acquiesce to its certainty like the pages of sacred Scripture.

No Higher Court of Appeal

I get annoyed when I see the bumper sticker that says: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” I think we should eliminate that middle phrase. If God says it, ladies and gentlemen, it is settled, whether you believe it or not. There is no higher court of appeal than the voice of God. It is perfectly appropriate for the Apostle Paul, when defending the gospel he has been commissioned to proclaim, to say: “It is found in Scripture. Let me take you back to Genesis, through Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalms.”

In the same way, our Lord Himself, as He walked with the disciples on the road to Emmaus after His resurrection, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, opened the Old Testament text to them so that they should not be surprised by His resurrection. Remember that His identity was still hidden from them, and when they sat down to break bread together, Jesus left them. Then they suddenly realized who it was, and they said, “Did not our hearts burn within us when He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”

Can you identify with that? There is a bad kind of heartburn, but there is also a good kind of heartburn. This is the good kind of heartburn when your heart burns as you see the power of sacred Scripture authenticating God’s truth repeatedly.

The Davidic Messiah

Paul speaks of the gospel “which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures.” Bear with me. We are still on the first sentence, but we are in the second verse, so we are making real progress. Paul continues, saying that the gospel God promised in the Scriptures is “concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” There is the kyrios to Paul’s doulos.

In this brief passage, Paul is calling Jesus the Son of God. He is calling Him the Messiah of Israel, because that is what the term “Christ” means. Remember, Jesus Christ is not His name. Jesus is His name. His full name would be Jesus bar Joseph or Jesus of Nazareth. But the word Christ is His title. When we say Jesus Christ, we are saying Iēsous Christos, Jesus Messiah.

Paul says that the Son of God is the Christ “who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.” This was important to the Jew because the Old Testament prophecies of the coming Messiah said the Messiah would be of the line and lineage of David. Why does Luke spent so much time on the nativity of Jesus, bringing us to Bethlehem, the city of David? Because the Old Testament prophesied that the Messiah would be born out of the loins of David. He would be David’s son, yet at the same time David’s Lord.

Spirit and Flesh

Paul reminds the recipients of this epistle that Jesus Christ was born of the seed of David, kata sarka, “according to the flesh.” I mention that because this is an important phrase in the New Testament. The Greek has two different words that refer to the physical nature of our humanity, words that are sometimes used interchangeably, but not always.

The more common word for body or the physical character of people is the word sōma. You may have heard psychiatrists and psychologists talk about psychosomatic illnesses. They are saying that these illnesses that you feel in your body have their genesis in disturbing aspects to your psychology. It is not that they are not real; they are real, but they affect your sōma, your body.

In addition to the term sōma is the word sarx, which also refers to the physical dimension of human life. Paul says elsewhere: “I did not meet Jesus kata sarka. I never met Him in the flesh. I met Him in the power of His resurrection on the road to Damascus, but I never met Him personally when He was in the flesh, during His incarnation in this world.” That is what Paul is getting at in this text.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, the term sarx, which is translated “flesh,” is loaded with theological content because it is used to describe our fallen, corrupt nature. Jesus says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). When Jesus says, “the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63), He is talking about our fallen condition, not our skin and bones. He is talking about our corrupt nature, which is set in contrast frequently in Scripture to the spirit.

There is a war in the Christian life between flesh and spirit. We still battle with the flesh, and it is not a battle with our physical bodies. It may include our physical bodies, but the battle between flesh and spirit is the battle between the old man—the fallen corrupt person—and the regenerated person, who now lives by the Spirit of God. Paul will talk about that later in Romans, but now he is saying that according to the flesh, in terms of His physical humanity, Jesus was born of the seed of David. In saying this, Paul is not denying the virgin birth, wherein Christ received His deity not from Mary or Joseph, but He brought His deity with Him from heaven. The virgin birth bypassed the normal human reproductive process, but nevertheless, touching His human nature, He was descended from David, but with respect to His divine nature, He was from the Logos of heaven.

God’s Powerful Declaration

Paul continues, saying that Jesus “was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness.” Paul summarizes the entirety of Jesus’ life and work here. He comes, He is born of the seed of David. Then God declares Him to be His Son in power. What Paul is referring to is clear because he mentions it in the next breath: the power of His resurrection. When God the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the tomb, it was God’s announcement to the world that this was His Son. By what evidence do we believe that Jesus is the Son of God? By the testimony of God, who has declared Him to be His Son through the power of the resurrection.

When we were studying Acts, we saw Paul go to Athens and debate with the philosophers on Mars Hill at the Areopagus. When Paul saw their monument to an unknown God, in the course of his proclamation, he said, “These times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17:30–31). In other words, God declared Christ to be His Son by the resurrection.

Someone visited our church last Sunday morning and was with a friend who goes to this church. The young man shook hands with me at the door, and his friend said: “This is my buddy. He came with me today. He’s agnostic.” Most agnostics use the term agnostic because they want to say, “I’m not a militant atheist.” But in truth, they are worse. Not only do they refuse to affirm the existence of God, but they blame God for their disobedience. They blame God for not providing enough information for them to make an intelligent decision.

As we will see in the rest of chapter 1, Paul labors the point that God has manifested Himself so clearly to every human being that nobody has an excuse for denying Him. When God declares His Son to be His Son through the power of the resurrection, that may be all you ever get. You may be like Thomas and say, “Unless I see Him and put my hand in His wounds and in His side, I’m not going to believe.” You will not be justified by saying that to God on judgment day, who has manifested the reality of Jesus through the power of the resurrection. That is what Paul appeals to in this text: “I’m not declaring to you that Jesus is the Son of God. Rather, God has declared that to you by the Holy Ghost in the power of the resurrection.”

The Church’s Call

Paul continues, “Through Him we have received grace and apostleship.” I could stop there and just say, “Through Jesus, we have received grace, and we have received the gift and the responsibility of apostleship.” But “grace” and “apostleship” have a purpose here: “We have received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations for His name, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ.”

Do you see how quickly Paul moves from his own call as an Apostle to the call shared by every Christian in the church at Rome, to the call shared by every Christian in every church in every age? The Bible calls them “the elect,” the called-out ones. The church is the ekklēsia, taking the verb kaleō, meaning “to call,” and the prefix ek, meaning “out of.” Every Christian is called out of the world, out of bondage, out of death, out of sin, into Christ and into His body. So, Paul reminds them: “I’m not the only one that’s been called. If you are part of the church, then you too have been called out, separated by the power of the Holy Ghost.”

What are believers called to be? Paul gives the answer in verse 7: “To all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.” That is your vocation. What are you studying? I am studying to be a saint. Do you think it will ever happen? It has already happened if you are in Christ Jesus. You are already numbered among the saints.

The word translated “saint” in the New Testament means “sanctified one,” one who has been set apart by the Holy Spirit, one who has been called inwardly by Christ to Himself. If you put your trust in Christ, you are right now, as I speak, a saint. You are set apart. You are part of the invisible church, the church that is beloved of God.

Peace from God

Finally, in this section, Paul gives his traditional greeting, “Grace to you and peace.” In the Old Testament days, the Jews greeted each other the same way they do today: shalom aleichem, “Peace be unto you.” The response would be aleichem shalom, “And peace also to you.” You might hear your Jewish friends say, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

For centuries, the Jewish benediction has been that the Lord would bless you and keep you and cause His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you, and lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace. The peace that Christ gives is not as the world gives, as Jesus said in His final will and testament before He left this world. But He left us His peace that transcends earthly peace, peace that is permanent, eternal, peace by which the warfare between the sinner and God is over.

Isaiah was directed by God to say:

“Comfort yes, comfort My people!”
Says your God.
Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,
That her warfare is ended,
That her iniquity is pardoned;
For she has received from the Lord’s hand
Double for all of her sins. (Isa. 40:1–2)

That cry, beloved, is pronounced on every Christian. That is why Jesus is the consolation of Israel. That is why He is our Paraclete. He is the One who comforts us because He gives us the peace of God that cannot be revoked. It is not an uneasy truce. God does not rattle the sword every time He is distressed with our behavior. As those who are reconciled and justified, as we will see later, we possess that peace right now, now and forevermore. That is integral to the Apostolic greeting, “grace and peace,” because they go together. The peace of God is not something we could ever earn, merit, or deserve, but rather the peace that comes from God is by His grace.

Paul wishes for his friends in the church in Rome that they would receive the grace of God. Dear ones, that is my deepest prayer for each one of you, that you would know the grace of God and the power of the resurrection of Jesus, and that you would know His peace today and forevermore. We start this evening with the introduction, the greeting. Next week, God willing, we will turn our attention to the body of the content of this epistle.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.