Making Sense of Romans: When You Read it for Yourself

By Terry Young

The letter to the Romans is the most sustained and systematic of Paul’s explanations of what faith is and how it works. He is hardly past the introduction when he lays down the direction he plans to take in this verse. This book is going to be about the gospel – a fact he has trailed in verse 1: that is what he was set apart for, so it is hardly a surprise that the gospel is what he most wants to write about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Words by Faith
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995485914

Book preview

MAKING SENSE OF

ROMANS

Making Sense of

Romans

when you read it for yourself

Terry Young

Copyright © Terry Young 2016

First published 2016 by

www.wordsbyfaith.com

The right of Terry Young to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE.

ISBN: 978-0-9954859-0-7

Further copies of this book as well as details of other publications, are available from

www.wordsbyfaith.com

DEDICATION

To the next generation:

To Joel and Hatti, to Nathan and to Alex.

PREFACE

This book came out of a discussion on the leadership team at Slough Baptist Church to develop a series on Romans that would help us to grow as a community of believers and also provide a way of exploring gifts as an integral part of church life. So I would like to thank the Church Council for providing the opportunity to do this, and especially Andy Perryman, the pastor, and my fellow elders at the time, Paul Abeyta and John Shepherd, and Jon Edwins who stepped up when I stepped down. Part of their forbearance has been to delay a series that we thought might originally run in 2014.

I would also like to thank those who have read the emerging chapters: correcting, challenging and adding insight. Tony Brown has done most, turning around whole chapters in days, checking references, positioning the arguments and pointing to material by such thinkers as Jim Packer or John Stott, whom I have not read at length. And he checked all the references, which as anyone who has written a Bible study knows is real chore. Thanks, too, to the others who read and fed back, sometimes at length: Des Dummett, Dee Molton and Pauline Scott. I haven’t been able to address everyone’s comments, but I have tried to develop questions where I felt I lacked the scope to sculpt the text.

And finally, a big thank you to Dani for her support and her willingness to let me type in a few thousand words here and there. She has great faith in me, has given up all hope of changing me but loves me just the same.

Thank you all.

Terry Young, Datchet 2016

CONTENTS

Preface

Part one: Understanding the book

1: I Am Not Ashamed (1:16)

2: By Faith from First to Last (1:17)

3: A Law Apart (3:21)

4: Hope of the Glory of God (5:2)

5: The God of Hope (15:13)

6: Demonstration of Love (5:6)

7: Who Shall Separate Us from the Love of Christ? (8:37)

8: Dimensions of the Gospel (8:38–39)

Part Two: growing Together

9: Struggling with Sin (7:4)

10: Jews and Gentiles (9:1–3)

11: Spiritual Gifts (12:6)

12: Strong and Weak (14:1)

13: Friendship (16:1–2)

Indices

PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING THE BOOK

1 | I AM NOT ASHAMED OF THE GOSPEL

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. (Romans 1:16)

The letter to the Romans is the most sustained and systematic of Paul’s explanations of what faith is and how it works. He is hardly past the introduction when he lays down the direction he plans to take in this verse. This book is going to be about the gospel – a fact he has trailed in verse 1: that is what he was set apart for, so it is hardly a surprise that the gospel is what he most wants to write about.

Paul is not the only writer to start off with reference to the gospel: Mark (chapter 1, verse 1, or Mark 1:1) tells us that he is writing about ‘the beginning of’ the gospel, although the NIV (New International Version, 2011) translates the word as ‘good news.’ We are comfortable with the idea that the narratives of Jesus’ life and teaching should be called ‘gospels’ and we use that term when we refer to the contributions by Matthew, Luke and John, also.

A global gospel

But Paul is not talking just about a story – although it is a magnificent story. He has already told us that he is writing about something he was called for (Romans 1:1), something he preaches with all his heart (Romans 1:9) and something he longs to preach in Rome (Romans 1:15), the destination for this letter and the place where his original audience lived. But later on in this letter (Romans 15:24 & 28), we discover that he plans to move on and preach in Spain, too.

The references to Spain seem odd to us, but they explain something of Paul’s vision for the whole world. Paul has preached the gospel and founded churches east of Rome and he plans to preach it to the end of the world in the west: the Pillars of Hercules where, after the Strait of Gibraltar, there was nothing but sea.

Rome was the heart of the political and geographical world in which he lived and the gospel is something that people in Rome needed to hear – his fellow Jews, everyday people in Rome, right up to the Emperor. We see this vision being steadily realised, so that before the end of his life he can write that the palace guard is well aware of this message (Philippians 1:13). And so, during his life, we see him getting closer and closer to his goal, first to Rome and then, he hopes, to the edge of nowhere in the west. Luke’s narrative at the end of Acts shows just how far Paul got into the heart of the Empire, but the light is fading fast and we don’t quite know what happened in the end. Except that Luke doesn’t think he is writing an ending but, like Mark, that he is writing about a beginning.

So then, Paul is fanatical about the gospel and its importance to all humanity, even though the story began in a backwater of the known world. He is committed to proclaiming it in the capital city and moving on to the ends of the earth with it, because the gospel matters to everyone.

our world is both bigger and smaller than Paul’s. In his spellbinding reflections on flying – Skyfaring: a journey with a pilot – Mark Vanhoenacker describes the dislocation of starting a day in Tokyo and turning in thousands of miles away, maybe in London, when his day is done. In between, there is only the hint of the millions of people passing by underneath, the impersonal electronic ‘handshake’ with beacons below and the formal handover from controller to controller. Paul could not have conceived of the distances Mark Vanhoenacker covers in a single day, and he had to slog on foot or haphazardly by sea to reach towns that are only minutes apart by air. We are also aware of things as they happen, even when they are on the other side of the world. Last week I watched as Usain Bolt won the 100m sprint, although the margin of victory was just one hundredth of a second. In the past, it might have taken half an hour to declare the winner locally, whereas now the global audience knew the result within seconds. So in some ways our world is much smaller than Paul’s.

But it is also much bigger. Rome was the size of one of our provincial cities – Leeds, perhaps – while the Roman Empire is estimated to have had a population somewhere between that of modern Italy and Germany, give or take a few million people. Meanwhile, the whole world held fewer, maybe many fewer, people than the USA does today. That there could in future be many countries – Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan – each with as many people as there were in the whole of his world or single countries that would dwarf any contemporary concept of population – India or China – would have blown his mind, but not his vision!

Patrick Johnstone, starting with Operation World, has probably done more than anyone else to show how the gospel has been preached across this larger canvas and how Paul’s dream of reaching everyone remains viable in our era.

And it is perhaps here that our view of the world most differs from Paul’s. Paul was convinced of the global – the cosmic, even – significance of the gospel. It was, as this chapter’s header text says, for everyone. This is a difficult belief to hold in our world, where we struggle to articulate any truly universal privileges or commitments. Where we ascribe rights, we lack the ability to make them stick in all but a very few spheres of the most privileged societies. Even science, which seemed to offer the best universal framework outside of a faith, and which has transformed our world through engineering and medicine, is increasingly being abandoned in favour of a modern secular religion with the acts of worship, the sense of awe, the icons and perhaps a personal moral agenda, but no God. And so we have the emergence of a new breed of prophet, Richard Dawkins being an obvious example, to call people back to the truth. His immediate target is those with religious belief, but I wonder at times if his wider congregation is a much larger pool of people who want the benefits of science but not the belief.

Is the gospel for the secularists, the people planning their own philosophy, the hedonists, the self-centred, those committed to helping others, those who follow a different faith, the militants, the informed, the ignorant, the arrogant, the zealots and the apathetic? This, surely, is the first great challenge of this verse and of this letter.

So what is the gospel?

one of my reasons for wanting to write this book is to sort things out in my own mind. Like most people reading this, I have integrated over the years a set of beliefs about how one becomes a Christian and goes on from there. But the central question of what the gospel is continues to prove elusive; the more I probe it, the less I feel I really understand. I hope to have a better, more consistent grasp by the time I get to the end of the book, and I hope in time that it will have the same effect on you, but it is a journey of discovery.

It is written in 13 chapters because the plan is to teach Romans to a Sunday morning congregation in a calendar quarter. It is targeted at people who, like me, have not trained formally in theology, who want to follow Jesus in their developing faith: thinking, ordinary people. That includes those who play a meaningful role in life. That may be through a job and I expect people who hold down a job to be able to get into this. It includes those who contribute to the lives of others as a parent, carer, spouse, friend, counsellor, or whatever. But I also mean those who have a set of skills for contemporary living, who use smart phones or tablets, who follow current affairs or sport, who have a hobby or pastime that has left them with a keen insight into something that others do not necessarily share, amateurs who do what they do for the sheer love of doing so, and people who know how to find out more when they are stuck.

And I hope this will make this approach different from anything you have come across in other study books you have read. This is not about sharing my knowledge or insights with you – sometimes I will know less than you do. Rather, this book is about finding and sharing methods that will let everyday people engage with the letter without five years of Greek or a degree in theology. To do this, I am working with two ideas that I think are very powerful and that I will try to explain by using them: making better use of the knowledge tools that are out there, and using a simple framework of faith, hope and love, to shine a fresh light upon the letter as a whole. This will not be enough to explain Romans to you – and there are lots of much better commentaries and study material for you if that is your goal – but I hope it will be enough for you to get started and to enable you to gather enough momentum to study the Bible for yourself.

So then, we will leave that to become clearer as we develop the framework and use the tools that are out there and press on. Let us start by considering three more things that come out of this verse and that will send us enthusiastically on our quest.

Good news!

First, the gospel is good news. So, as a thoughtful person, you might like to reach for that smart phone or tablet and get your search engine to help you find an interlinear version of Romans 1, with the Greek. The sequence ‘romans 1 interlinear’ got me to http://biblehub.com/interlinear/romans/1.htm (for the record, I looked this up on 31 August 2015). I like Bible Hub, but you may prefer something different, or by the time you read this, there may be something much better out there. But you should be able to follow the drift. There is a clip from Casablanca where Dooley Wilson sings a song by Herman Hupfield that explains how the fundamental things still apply. As with love, so with theology… as time goes by!

Isn’t this a bit deep for an easy-read introduction to Romans? Well, for a reasonably smart citizen of the modern world, I don’t think so. If you discovered you had diabetes, or cardiac arrhythmia, it would not be long before you were entering keywords into a search engine (although I am not plugging a particular brand). If you were cooking risotto or wondering why the vacuum cleaner had switched off for the third time in five minutes, you might go straight to your favourite video provider for a clip of an expert showing you what to do next. The last time we saw such a leap in the technology of knowledge was half a millennium ago with the invention of the printing press. A profoundly prescient and persistent Christian, William Tyndale (1494–1536) saw what it would mean if anyone could have God’s Word in their own hands and in their own language. His plan was famously expressed: even the boy who followed the plough would know the Bible better than the clergy. Melvyn Bragg’s The Book of Books explains how startlingly this came true as people found that they could read and study Scripture for themselves. In fact, many learned to read in the first place through the legacy that Tyndale left behind in the form of the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611.

As reasonably thoughtful Christians, it is our privilege and responsibility to use the tools and knowledge at our disposal to understand and pursue our faith at least as well as we manage our health or find a filter for the dishwasher.

So what does Bible Hub offer? Well, most times it saves several hours of diligent study using concordances and other supporting material. It will not turn you into an overnight scholar, but it will provide enough new knowledge for you to enjoy the text in a new way, even after quite short visits. It may even provide enough encouragement for you to go further and learn the basics of the grammar. Each line on display is actually five lines – a bit like a musical score. The top line is a set of numbers that relate to the Greek word used and can be used to connect up words with similar roots. Next down is a phonetic reading of the Greek, using the English alphabet. The middle line is the Greek and below it is a word-for-word translation of the Greek. Finally, the bottom line tells you what part of speech each noun, verb, adjective, and so forth, is.

Now, scroll down to verse 16 of Romans 1, and you will see that the word above ‘gospel’ is presented phonetically as ‘euangelion’ and the reference number above is 2098 [e]. If you do the same thing for Mark 1:1, you will see a very similar word for gospel ‘euangeliou’ but the same code, 2098 [e]. If you click on 2098, you get a definition for the word – ‘good news’ – and discover that it comes from Strong’s Concordance. A wider search will tell you that Dr James Strong first published this in 1890.

And so we know that the gospel is good news – translated in the NIV as the former term in Romans 1 and as the latter in Mark 1.

So, how easy would it be for most people to guess that the gospel is good news? So many presentations of the gospel seek to emphasise the moral peril we are in before introducing a message of hope. Taking this approach means that the gospel can only be good news once we have taken the time to frame it within the full depth of darkness of the bad news. Clearly there is a place for framing things properly. I remember a collage I made in primary school using sticky squares of coloured paper. It was an underwater scene with lots of blue, a couple of brightly coloured fish and, if I recall rightly, an