Paul acknowledges the faith of the Roman church and the impact throughout the world and his desire to see them. Paul continues the theme of faith and connecting it to the gospel of Christ. Here we find how the righteous man will live.

This evening, we will direct our attention once more to Paul’s letter to the Romans. I will be reading from Romans 1:8–17, and I ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers, making request if, by some means, now at last I may find a way in the will of God to come to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, so that you may be established— that is, that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.

Now I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often planned to come to you (but was hindered until now), that I might have some fruit among you also, just as among the other Gentiles. I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise. So, as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”

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

Our Father, we implore You for Your mercy and grace upon us, that as we give heed to this weighty epistle, so important for our understanding of Your grace and the way of salvation, that You would condescend once more to our frailty and weakness. Open our eyes and hearts to the truths contained herein, that the same Spirit who inspired these words as they were written, now may be present to illumine their meaning to our understanding. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Faith Known Throughout the World

In our text, Paul continues his greetings and opening comments to the church at Rome before he plunges into the content of the theological understanding of the gospel he sets forth throughout the entire epistle.

Paul begins by saying, “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all.” The Apostle’s heart was constantly filled with thanksgiving. The word he uses in the epistle is eucharistō, from which the church derives the term Eucharist, which was used to describe the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the primitive Christian church. At the heart of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a profound spirit of thanksgiving for what God has wrought for us in the work of Jesus Christ.

Paul mentions his spirit of thankfulness for these Roman Christians, that their “faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” The words he conjoins together are the word for universe and the word for cosmos, so he could say, “The reputation of your faith has been broadcast and published through the cosmos” or “through the universe.” In a sense, that is hyperbole, but pay attention to Paul’s use of the term “world” here.

This is one of the many places in the Bible where a word for “world” is used, and we have a tendency to read into these expressions our contemporary understanding and use of the term “world.” When we think of the world, we think of the entire planet. We think of all the continents and all the people who live in far-off places that are unknown to us personally. When first-century people spoke of the world, they were speaking of the known world. They were speaking essentially of the Mediterranean world that was in their purview. When Paul says, “I rejoice that your faith is known throughout the world,” he is talking in the way people talked at that time. He is saying, “I’m glad that throughout our known world, throughout the Mediterranean world, people everywhere are talking about your faith, which has made an impact.”

This is one of my hopes for Saint Andrew’s, that people around the world as we know the world, beyond our known little world and through the whole world, will know of your faith and concern for the missionary outreach of the church.

Lawful Oaths

Paul then says something unusual that appears to be somewhat problematic if you pay attention to teaching elsewhere in the New Testament. We are told by Jesus, for example, in the gospel of Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not swear at all: neither by heaven . . . nor by the earth . . . But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’” (Matt. 5:34–35, 37). That is repeated in the epistle of James, where James emphasizes telling the truth in simplicity. He says, “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’” (James 5:12). Some have understood these statements to mean that there are never situations in life where it is appropriate to take oaths or vows.

The confessional basis of Saint Andrew’s is the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it has an entire chapter titled “Of Lawful Oaths and Vows.” There it rehearses situations in which it is legitimate and indeed something delightful to God when people enter covenant relationships and swear solemn oaths and vows, such as when we contract marriages or join the church. As we witnessed this morning, when people join Saint Andrew’s for the first time, they take vows before God and before the congregation. Another way we see that there are appropriate times for the taking of oaths is because the Apostles themselves from time to time swore an oath to guarantee the trustworthiness of what they were saying, as we do in the courtroom when we say, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” That is what Paul does in this text.

Paul is so eager that the people who receive this epistle understand the depth of passion he feels in his grateful heart for the publishing of their faith throughout the known world that he swears a vow. He says, “For God is my witness.” We will see later that this is not the last time in Romans that the Apostle takes such a vow to guarantee the truth of what he is saying.

The Gospel of God’s Son

Paul continues, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers, making request if, by some means, now at last I may find a way in the will of God to come to you.” The basic purpose of Paul’s vow is to assure the Christians in Rome that he has not just casually desired to visit them but has mentioned them constantly in his prayers. He has been hoping and planning with all that is within him to somehow, through the will of God, make it to Rome. Paul had no idea when he wrote these words that the somehow—the manner in the will of God by which he would finally make it to Rome—was in chains as a prisoner of the Roman government. But I also do not want us to jump too hastily over a comment he makes in passing when he says in this vow, “God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son.”

Earlier in the first chapter, Paul said that he was separated as an Apostle and called by God to preach the gospel of God. As I reminded you when we looked at it, the phrase “the gospel of God” does not mean the gospel about God, but it is the gospel that is the possession of God. God owns that gospel. He is the One who conceived the gospel. He is the one who commissions Paul to teach the gospel. The gospel does not originate with Paul; it originates with God.

Paul uses the same structure here to talk about the gospel. Instead of talking about the gospel of God, he talks about the gospel of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. So, in the same sense, the gospel is the possession of Jesus, but it is not only the possession of Jesus; Jesus is the heart of the content of the gospel.

Gospel in the Old Testament

Let me do a some historical reconnaissance of the use of the term gospel. We often use it glibly in the church today. I regularly hear preachers say, “I preach the gospel,” but if you listen to them preach Sunday after Sunday, you hear very little gospel in what they preach. It has come to mean a nickname for preaching anything rather than preaching a definitive content as it does in the New Testament.

The word for gospel is the word euangelion. It has that prefix eu, which comes over into English in all manner of words. We talk about euphonics and euphonious music, things that sound good. We talk about a eulogy, which is a good word pronounced about a person at their funeral service. The prefix eu means something good or pleasant.

The word angelos or angelion is the word for message. Angels are messengers, and angelos is a one who delivers a message. Right now, as I am preaching to you a message from God, you can certainly consider me an angel, albeit in a certain manner of disguise, I would grant you that. But this word euangelion, which means a good message or good news, has a rich background in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, the basic meaning of the term gospel was an announcement of a message that was a good message. If the doctor came to see you when you were sick, and the doctor examined you and said, “It’s nothing serious, so you’re going to get well,” that was gospel, that was good news.

In the ancient days, when soldiers went out to battle, people waited breathlessly for a report from the battlefield regarding how the battle went, and marathon runners dashed back to the cities to give a report to the outcome. That is the background of Isaiah 52:7:

How beautiful upon the mountains
Are the feet of him who brings good news.

Watchmen stationed in a watchtower would look as far as the eye could see into the distance. Finally, when the watchman saw the dust moving from the runner’s feet as he sped back to the city to give the report of the battle, the watchman was trained to tell by the way the runner’s legs were churning whether the news was good news or bad news. If he was doing the survival shuffle, it was an indication that he was coming with a grim report, but if his legs were flying and the dust was being kicked up, that meant good news. So, Isaiah said, “How beautiful are the feet of the messenger who brings good tidings.” That is the concept of gospel in its most rudimentary sense.

Gospel in the New Testament

When we come to the New Testament, we find three distinct ways in which the term gospel is used. You are likely familiar with one of them. We have four books in the New Testament that we call the Gospels: the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of Mark, the gospel of Luther, and the gospel of John. “Luther” is what one of my students in college said—the four Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luther, and John. But no, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four Gospels. These biographical portraits of Jesus are called the Gospels. It is a word that has a technical sense to describe a particular form of literature in the New Testament.

Before the Epistles were written, during the earthly ministry of Jesus, the term gospel was not particularly linked with the person of Jesus, but with the gospel of the kingdom. John the Baptist is introduced as one who comes preaching the gospel, and his message was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Matt. 3:2).

In like manner, Jesus, following the example of John, also preached the gospel of the coming kingdom of God. Jesus would say in His parables, “The kingdom of God is like unto this or that.” On the lips of Jesus, the gospel was about a dramatic moment in history when the long-awaited Messiah, the long-awaited son of David would restore the kingdom to the people. This was the kingdom of God Himself now breaking through in time and space. The good news was the good news of the kingdom.

By the time we get to the Epistles, particularly the Pauline Epistles, the term gospel takes on a new shade of understanding. Now it is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the gospel of Jesus Christ has a clear content to it. At the heart of the gospel is the announcement of who Jesus is and what He accomplished in His lifetime.

If you give your testimony to your neighbor and say, “I became a Christian last year and gave my heart to Jesus,” you are bearing witness about Jesus, but you are not telling them the gospel, because the gospel is not about you. The gospel is about Jesus, what He did, His life of perfect obedience, His atoning death on the cross, His resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, and His outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church. Those are crucial elements of the gospel that we call the objective aspects of the New Testament gospel of Christ.

However, in addition to the person and work of Jesus, there is also in the New Testament use of the term gospel, the question of how the benefits accomplished by the objective work of Jesus are subjectively appropriated to the believer. First, there is who Jesus is and what Jesus did. Then the question is how that benefits us. That is why Paul conjoins with the objective account of the person and work of Jesus, particularly in Galatians, that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is essential to the gospel. In preaching the gospel, we preach about Jesus, and we preach about how we are brought into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

Beloved, this understanding of the gospel is under attack in the church today. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get the gospel right and to understand both the objective aspect of the person and work of Jesus and the subjective dimension of how we benefit from that by faith and by faith alone.

I recently heard a Protestant, supposedly evangelical, seminary professor claim that the doctrine of imputation—that is, the doctrine that our sins are transferred to Christ on the cross and by our faith His righteousness is transferred to us—is a human invention and has nothing to do with the gospel. I wanted to weep when I heard that. It underscored in red how delicate the preservation of the gospel is and how careful the church has to be in every age to guard the precious good news that comes to us from God.

Mutual Encouragement

After Paul speaks of the gospel of His Son, he says that without ceasing he mentions them in his prayers, making the request that he might find a way to get there to Rome. He says: “For I long to see you. I’ve heard about you. I get reports from Rome. But I haven’t seen you. I haven’t met you. I long—I have a deep yearning, a passion in my soul to meet you face to face.” Why? “That I may impart to you some spiritual gift, so that you may be established.”

“Established” does not mean getting started in the Christian faith, but rather being confirmed, built up, edified. That is what he means by “established.” He does not say, “I want to come to you for what you can do for me.” Nor does he say, “I want to come to you and lay hands on you, so that you can receive one of the charismatic gifts.” Rather, Paul is talking about establishing them in confidence and in maturity in their Christian faith. Let us keep that in mind. That is why Paul wrote this letter to the Romans. It is why, in the providence of God, this letter is given to us. It is for our edification so that the faith that has taken root in our souls may be established and we might grow to maturity and full conformity to the image of Christ.

Paul makes a comment in passing, and I do not want to labor it. He says, “That is, that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.” One of the things that made Paul such a tremendous pastor as well as a theologian, missionary, evangelist, is noticeable when he recalled the experiences that he had with those in Corinth and essentially told them, “I was with you in your afflictions, in your trials.” Paul did not just preach at people or preach to people, but he became involved with them in his heart, in his prayers, and in his concern for their well-being, and he wanted to encourage them. So, Paul says to the Romans, “I long to be with you, not just that I can encourage you, but also that we can be encouraged together.”

Is there anybody who does not need to be encouraged? There are pastors here tonight who have come from all over this country, and I think the main reason they come to events like this is to be encouraged. So often, the work of the pastorate in our day is an exercise in discouragement. The pastor is fair game for every criticism. Every Sunday afternoon, people have roast pastor for dinner.

Pastors are human. When you stand at the door at the end of the service, you might have fifty people walk up, and forty-nine of them say to you: “Thank you, pastor, for breaking the Word of God to us today. It ministered to me, and I appreciate that message I heard this morning.” But one person might come up and say: “I can’t believe the bad sermon you preached this morning. That was awful. Where did you get off talking like that?” If you are a human being, when you go home, what do you remember? Do you remember the forty-nine words of encouragement or the one word of discouragement? If you are like me, the rest of the day, it eats away at you. That is why pastors have to be encouraged, and Paul needed that kind of encouragement. If people are throwing stones at you everywhere you go, it is nice to have someone give you a word of encouragement from time to time. Paul says, “I long to come to Rome so that I can encourage you and that you can encourage me.”

Paul’s Debt

He says again: “I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often planned to come to you (but was hindered until now), that I might have some fruit among you, just as among the other Gentiles.” Notice that Paul refers to the Roman Christians as basically gentiles. I am sure that there were Jewish converts mixed in among the gentiles there, but we know also that the Christian Jews had been forced out of Rome by the Emperor Claudius a little before this epistle was written. Maybe basically all those who were left were gentiles. Either way, the Roman community was made up more of gentiles than of Jewish believers.

Paul says, “I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise.” Notice the language he uses. He does not say, “I’m a debtor to the Jew and to the Greek,” not at this point. He says, “I’m a debtor to the Greek and the barbarian.” When Paul talks about “the Greek” here, he is talking about the highly cultured, civilized, intellectual elite of the ancient culture as distinguished from the rest of the gentiles, who were pagan barbarians. He says, “I’m in debt both to the Greek, the high minded, and to the barbarian.”

What does Paul mean by “debt”? He is not talking about a pecuniary obligation or debt. It is not that he owes money to both sides. Rather, he feels a moral debt. He is burdened by an obligation that goes with his office as an Apostle. Remember, he is the one who was set apart to be the Apostle to the gentiles. He is saying, “I’m spending my entire life discharging this obligation that I owe.”

Ultimately, it is the debt Paul owes to God. It is the debt he owes to Christ. At the same time, he transfers that indebtedness, that obligation, to the people who need to hear the gospel. He says, “As long as I’m alive, I can’t pay that debt, because I owe my life to every person that I meet, both to the wise and to the unwise.” He is putting them all together to say, “Everyone I meet, I meet as one who owes my fellow person the message of the gospel.”

The Joy of Preaching the Gospel

I talked to a member of our church recently who said to me after a service: “R.C., I want you to know something. I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of my life to serving Jesus.” I have heard that many times from people, but it never gets boring. It never gets stale to hear someone with a fervency of heart and soul say: “I’m going to quit fooling around. The rest of my life is going to be devoted to the service of Jesus Christ.” That should be the heartbeat of every believer.

Paul says, “So, as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also.” Paul is reaching down into his soul to speak of the depth of his own passion. He says: “As much as is in me, every fiber of my being is ready to preach the gospel to you. I can’t wait to get to Rome.”

I have mentioned before how I had a goal to be a seminary professor by the time I was fifty. Then when I was twenty-nine, I got the job, and I was bored for a time. The seminary was in downtown Philadelphia on the campus at Temple University. I used to take the train into town, get off at 30th Street Station, and walk down Broad Street to the seminary, and it was like pulling teeth. I remember making that walk and dreading those classes. I used to have these pangs of conscience. I would say: “I should be thrilled to have the opportunity to teach these things to these young men training for the ministry. Why do I see it as an unpleasant burden?”

Some of you are in the ministry and know what I am talking about. Sometimes you cannot stand to get up on Sunday morning, and you say: “I wish I could sleep in. Part of my congregation is, but I can’t. They sleep while I’m preaching and catch up on their naps.” We have to be there, and we do not always feel like being there. But for the pastor, it should be like Paul, that as much as is in us, we cannot wait to carry on this ministry and preach this gospel.

Not Ashamed

Why is Paul so eager? He answers that question this way: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” He explains why in a moment, but let us just think about this statement: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel.”

Have you ever been ashamed of being a Christian? Have you ever tried to avoid the hostility of the world, the scorn heaped upon those known as disciples of Christ in a culture hostile to Christianity?

If you think our culture is hostile to the gospel, think of the culture that Paul was dealing with in the first century. He says: “I’m not ashamed. I glory in it. Let him who boasts boast of the Lord.” There is nothing that excites Paul more than being known as a Christian. He has no shame.

Jesus warned us, “If you’re ashamed of Me before men, I’ll be ashamed of you before My Father.” That is a real predicament for many Christians. They want to be Secret Service Christians. They do not want to be known as being holier than thou.

If you say one word to your friends about Christ, you will likely be accused of trying to shove the gospel down their throat. That is the nature of the beast. If we get rebuffed enough times, soon enough we become embarrassed about our faith. But not the Apostle Paul. He says, “As much as is in me, I can’t wait to get to Rome, and I’ll tell you why: I am not ashamed of the gospel.”

Why is Paul not ashamed? Listen to this, because this is dynamite, or power—literally, dynamis is the Greek word from which we get the English word dynamite—“For it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.”

Looking for Power in the Wrong Places

This summer I had the opportunity to speak at the Founders group at a special breakfast at the Southern Baptist Convention, and on that occasion, I borrowed a sermon from Martin Luther. I let them know that’s what I was doing. I was taken by the fact that when Luther preached his last sermon on February 15th, 1546, in his hometown of Eisleben, he made these observations that I will communicate to you.

Luther had been summoned from Wittenberg where he was a professor back to his hometown of Eisleben because a serious rift had developed between two nobles. They hoped that if Luther would come and mediate the debate and dispute, peace would come back to the city. So, Luther agreed to make the arduous journey to Eisleben.

The last time I was in Eisleben, I was able to stand in the pulpit where Luther preached the final sermon of his life. He died two days after he preached this sermon. What he was concerned about in this sermon was the gospel. He had warned the people earlier that any time the gospel is preached accurately and passionately, it will bring conflict. People flee from conflict, so every generation will tend to water down the gospel, hide the gospel, and let it be eclipsed into darkness, as it had been for the centuries before the Reformation.

Even by the end of Luther’s life, he was seeing the eclipse of the gospel already taking place in Germany. Listen to what he said: “In times past we would have run to the ends of the world if we had known of a place where we could have heard God speak.” Wouldn’t you, if you knew that God were going to give utterance someplace, pay any price to go and hear God? Luther continued:

But now that we hear this every day in sermons, indeed, now that books are full of it, we do not see this happening. You hear at home in your house, father and mother and children sing and speak of it, the preacher speaks of it in the parish church—you ought to lift up your hands and rejoice that we have been given the honor of hearing God speaking to us through His Word.

Oh, people say, what is that? After all, there is preaching every day, often many times every day, so that we soon grow weary of it. What do we get out of it?

Have you ever heard that? “I go to church, but I don’t get much out of it.” The people who teach us how to grow churches tell us we really have to be sensitive to what people want. We have to scratch them where they itch, or they will not get anything out of it, and they will not come back. So, according to them, we have to cast our sermons and our messages not on the basis of what the Word of God declares but on the felt needs of the people.

Early on in Ligonier Ministries, we had a consultant come in, and he said: “Why are you selling the holiness of God? Nobody cares about the holiness of God. If you want this ministry to grow, you must minister to the felt needs of people.” I answered him: “No, I don’t, because what I preach and teach is not determined by what the people want to hear. I have a boss to whom I must answer, and God makes it a priority for people to understand His holy character. The people may not feel the need of that, but there’s nothing they need more desperately than to have their minds exploded in their understanding of who God is.” God forbid that we listen to Madison Avenue and those who tell us to become hucksters. This is what Luther was complaining about.

Luther continued in response to the people who asked what they got it of it, saying:

All right, go ahead, dear brother, if you don’t want God to speak to you every day at home in your house and in your parish church, then be wise and look for something else; in Trier is our Lord God’s coat, in Aachen there are Joseph’s pants and our blessed Lady’s chemise; go there and squander your money, buy indulgence and the pope’s secondhand junk . . .

But aren’t we stupid and crazy, yes, blinded and possessed by the devil? There sits the decoy duck in Rome with his bag of tricks, luring to himself the whole world with its money and goods, and all the while anybody can go to baptism, the sacrament, and the pulpit . . . What, baptism, sacrament, God’s Word?—Joseph’s pants, that’s what does it!

Luther said that the people in their madness were going all over Germany to find the nearest collection of relics—a piece of straw from the crib of Jesus, milk from the breast of His mother Mary, part of the beard of John the Baptist. That was what the church was selling, and why did people buy it? What did they want? What do people want today when they go to the person who promises healing and slays them in the Spirit? What are they looking for?

I can tell you what people are looking for: they are looking for power. They want a Christian experience that is powerful. They want power to manipulate their own environment. That is the great goal of the new age movement: to be able to bend spoons with your mind. Only One is omnipotent—the Lord God—and the Lord God has power to spare.

God does not need Joseph’s pants. He does not even need the gospel, yet it has pleased the Lord God omnipotent to invest His power not in Joseph’s pants or in the preacher’s ability to slay someone in the Spirit. His power is invested in the gospel. There is no program known to man that has the power that the gospel has. It is the Word of God that He has promised He will not allow to return unto Him void. The foolishness of preaching is the method He has chosen to save the world.

Paul says: “I am not ashamed. I want to preach the gospel.” Why? “It is the power of God to salvation.” The power is not in the preacher’s eloquence or the preacher’s education. It is the power of God. That is what we need: “It is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’”

Alien Righteousness

I am looking at the clock, and how can I only have six minutes left when I have just now finally come to the theme of the entire epistle? My wife says, “Sometimes you take a long time to get started.” This is one of those times.

In the gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.” I mentioned last week that this was the verse that God the Holy Spirit used to awaken Luther. As Luther was preparing his lectures on the book of Romans, he glanced at a manuscript from Saint Augustine where Augustine read this text.

Augustine said in a note that when this text speaks of the righteousness of God, it is not the righteousness by which God Himself is righteous, but it is righteousness that God provides for people who do not have any righteousness. It is that righteousness that He makes available by free grace to all who believe, what Luther called “alien righteousness.” This righteousness is not our own, but it is somebody else’s—it is Jesus’ righteousness.

Luther had sought every means he knew in the monastery to satisfy the demands of God’s law and never had peace. He would spend three or four hours in the confessional every day confessing sins from the last day, until his confessors said: “Brother Martin, if you have something to confess, make it something serious. You come to us and talk about coveting brother Andrew’s extra piece of bread from last night’s meal.” How much trouble can you get into in a monastery in twenty-four hours that you must spend three or four hours in the confessional?

But Luther was an expert in the law of God, and every day when he looked in the mirror of the law of God and examined his life against the mirror of God’s righteousness, he was in terror. We are not, because we have blocked out the view of God’s righteousness. We judge ourselves on a curve by ourselves and among ourselves. We never judge ourselves according to the standard of God’s perfection. If we ever did, we would be as tormented as Martin Luther was in the monastery.

Luther was moved on one occasion to say: “You ask me if I love God. Love God? Sometimes I hate Him. I see Christ simply as an angry judge who comes to me with His law to destroy me.” Suddenly, Luther understood another righteousness, a righteousness that was the free gift of God to all who put their trust in Christ, a righteousness that would avail to satisfy all the demands of God’s law.

Liberation from Guilt

Luther said that when he read Augustine’s note on this text and discovered the alien righteousness of Christ, “the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked through.” No wonder Luther stood against kings and officials of the church who would refuse to compromise, because once he tasted the gospel of Jesus Christ, once he was delivered from the pangs and torment of the law, nobody was going to take it from him.

I was involved in the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy many years ago, which was a ten-year initiative to defend the doctrine of Scripture. I was a member of that council, and I was asked to go to a seminary and meet with their entire faculty because the faculty had departed from that view. I had a discussion with them behind closed doors for about three hours.

Afterward, I was walking to my car in the parking lot, and the dean was with me. He said: “I just don’t understand you, R.C. Why do you care so deeply that the Bible is inerrant? What difference does it make?”

I answered: “My life was saved by this Word. There is nothing more precious to my soul than every word that’s found on its pages. How can you be the dean of a theological seminary and ask me what difference it makes? It’s the Word of God.” I understood the sense of liberation that Luther experienced from reading that text.

The Promise-Keeping God

Romans 1:17 is the thematic verse for the entire epistle to the Romans. Everything that comes after it will be an explanation of this one line: “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘the just shall live by faith.’” The word translated “righteousness” there is dikaiosynē. It is the word that is used for justification in the New Testament. We will see that word again and again as we pore over this manuscript to the Romans.

Paul says, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’” Three times that Old Testament verse is quoted in the New Testament: here in Romans 1:17, in Galatians 3:11, and in Hebrews 10:38. All three times, the text that is quoted goes back to the Old Testament book of the prophet Habakkuk.

Habakkuk was deeply distressed because the people of God were being invaded by pagans who were triumphing, and he was confused. He said: “God, You’re too holy to even look at iniquity. How can You allow this thing to happen to Your own people?”

Habakkuk stood in his watchtower and said:

I will stand my watch
And set myself on the rampart,

And watch to see what He will say to me
And what I will answer when I am corrected.

Then the Lord answered me and said:

“Write the vision
And make it plain on tablets,
That he may run who reads it.
For the vision is yet for an appointed time;
But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie.
Though it tarries, wait for it.” (Hab. 2:1–3)

Do you ever feel that tension with the Word of God and the promises of God, that they do not show up when you want them? You go to God crying: “God, where are You in this? Why aren’t You fulfilling the promises that You gave to our fathers?” Yet the God that we worship is a promise-keeping God.

This was the complaint of Habakkuk, and God said to him: “Habakkuk, I have set this for an appointed time. My words do not lie. I will do what I said I will do. Have patience. Wait. It may tarry, but if it tarries, wait for it.”

Believe God

God went on to say to Habakkuk:

“Because it will surely come,
It will not tarry.
Behold the proud,
His soul is not upright in him;
But the just shall live by his faith.” (Hab. 2:3–4)

That is, the righteous person is righteous in the sight of God not by his own righteousness; we have already established that. Rather, the righteous lives by trust.

When Jesus was in the Judean wilderness under the unbridled assault of Satan, lonely and hungry, Satan said, “Take these stones and make them bread.” Jesus would not do that: “Don’t you understand, Satan, that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds forth from the mouth of God?”

I have said to the people of Saint Andrew’s many times that anybody can believe in God. What it means to be a Christian is to believe God, to trust Him when He speaks. That does not require a leap of faith. That does not require crucifixion of the intellect. It requires a crucifixion of pride, because there is no one ever more trustworthy than God.

Why would you not trust God? When we do not trust Him, it is because we transfer to Him our own corrupt qualities. God does not have any of those corrupt qualities. You can trust Him with your life. That is the theme of Romans: the just shall live by faith. From that vantage point, Paul opens up the depths and riches of the whole gospel for the people of God. Let us pray.

Oh, Father, forgive us for our unbelief, for our lack of trust, for our shame and embarrassment of the gospel, and for looking every place but the gospel to find Your power. Thank you for this Word we have looked at tonight, that we may be encouraged as the Roman Christians were encouraged by it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.