Or, The Empire Disrupting Power of Romans
Scripture: Romans 5:21
Date: September 5, 2021
Speaker: Sean Higgins
The selection of a book of Scripture and start of a new sermon series is a big deal. Not that studying any part of the Bible would be bad (all His works are great and studied by His people for their delight, Psalm 111:2), but certainly some sections at some times are more relevant. Because of my approach, preferring to preach about paragraph at a time, a book with some size could be a year of two of Sundays.
Over the summer at least three people recommended Romans to me, about a month apart from each other and completely unaware of each other. They also had different reasons. There was no other consensus to consider, and all the elders affirmed the choice of Romans. Here we are.
I have taught through Romans about one and a half times already, and it was twenty years ago. I got into chapter eight with the seventh and eighth graders at Grace Community Church before moving to Marysville in 2001, and started over in chapter one that fall until finishing all sixteen chapters. Some of you here today not only heard those sermons, I think you’d say that some of those sermons were vital to your understanding and appreciation of the gospel. Maybe you remember titles such as “The Performance Treadmill” and “God’s Display of God.”
What shouldn’t be a surprise, but is still quite surprising, is that I am almost a completely different preacher than then, and while I still believe probably everything I said/taught, I can’t imagine saying/teaching it that way now. I believe the same gospel, and I’ve also come to see the gospel’s dominion in ways I didn’t have categories to imagine back then. “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9) is a confession like a deep and full well; the water on the surface is the same as the water further down, but by grace the taste keeps getting gooder.
In addition to commentaries, I’ve now read some of Livy and Suetonius and Tacitus; the historical context for Romans is more clear, and more ugly than I thought. I knew about paganism and idolatry and nationalism from the Old Testament, but now I’ve also read more about the myths and the “futile ways inherited from … forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18), so the religious context into which Jesus came and Paul preached is even more desperate and bleak than I had considered. I was living 2000 or so years into church history, but now I’ve learned more about how that history doesn’t make sense apart from the “flood-tide of Christ” (a phrase used in the third century).
It has affected even the angle from which I see the purpose of Paul in writing it, and how that makes it relevant for every context, but maybe especially as an encouragement for us, right now, staring wide-eyed and jaw-dropped at a society abandoned to God’s wrath like Romans 1, full of moral goodie-two-shoes (which we’ve nicknamed social justice warriors) like chapter 2, and headed toward the collapse of an empire with exactly the truth we need to repent from sin, resist sin, and rejoice in the God of our salvation.
It was a verse in Romans that converted Augustine (albeit in sort of a “random” reading). It was a phrase in Romans that liberated Martin Luther and ignited the 16h century Reformation. The truths in this letter are the core of Christianity’s dominance in Western Civilization. The gospel has done more to topple idols and tyrants, to undo sinners and Caesars, than any other single influence. The gospel of Christ is the power of God to subdue rebels and remake men.
And it is all gift .
The two greatest works of God are creation and redemption. Both are undeserved, unearned, and un-asked for. Both are givens. Both are gifts. Both gifts establish new ways of life.
Paul’s epistle to the Romans is perhaps the single greatest and sustained (let alone inspired) writing on salvation. As early as Romans 1:16, Paul presents the letter’s theme: the gospel. And as he had previously written to the Corinthians, and expands to the Romans, the gospel is the giving of Christ by the Father, the giving of Christ’s body to death, resurrected on the third day, and received by faith (1 Corinthians 15:1-5). That faith is a gift (Ephesians 2:8), and by faith we are justified as a gift unto righteous standing and new life and eternal life.
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, (Romans 3:23–24)
More gift than the sun is the Son, and more than breath is His blood, and more than fruit is the indwelling Spirit, and all the good is gift. The central event in human history is gift. The nature of God is that of generous giver. Paul argues in Romans 8 that if the Father has given His Son, how will He not with the Son graciously give us all things (Romans 8:32)?
These gifts are what disrupted the Roman Empire (and Roman Catholicism 16 centuries later).
What do you know about Rome around AD 57? As a city she could trace her history back to the 8th century BC. But by the time Paul wrote to the Romans the Roman Empire was the game in town, and Rome was the capital city. Nero had come to power in AD 54, and then scapegoated blame onto the Christians in AD 64 for burning the city. Before him, Rome had centralized power in Julius Caesar and Augustus and Tiberius and Caligula and Claudius, and they had conquered a wide territory. The luxury in Rome was only outdone by the slavery in Rome.
Paul himself was a Roman citizen (Acts 21:39), and after writing this letter (from Corinth) he would get his chance to visit, having appealed to Caesar as a prisoner. He had never been there (Romans 1:10), and we don’t know how the church started there (though we do know that there were Romans in Jerusalem at Pentecost, Acts 2:10). He would later be under house arrest in Rome, and be martyred in the city between AD 64-67.
But this world superpower was built on idolatry and superstition, and every sort of glory they knew was worldly, fleshly, hellish.
Rome was undone by her sin. Chapter 1 describes God’s abandoning wrath, as men refuse to acknowledge God, and He gives them over to their lusts. The lust of the flesh eats itself.
But it is also true that, considered from a different angle, Rome was undone by God’s gifts. The fall of the Roman Empire, and the subsequent two-thousand years of church history, are a record of how the gospel of Jesus Christ has been leavening the lump of the world. I am not a post-millennialist, for a number of reasons, but this does not deny the greater work of God’s gift in Jesus Christ, in the gospel, even in the book of Romans, to change the world. We do not live in the same world as those Christians to whom Paul wrote because of what he wrote, and those who have read it and been changed by God’s power. They have been changed by gift.
The empire of sin did not begin with the Caesars (obviously), but began when Adam sinned. The reign of sin and death has been disrupted not by better rules but by gift.
But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:15–17)
Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:20–21)
Can’t we say that gift reigns? At least we can say that God reigns, who gifted His Son. We can say that Jesus reigns, who gave Himself and then gifts His people with the gift of justification, the gift of sanctification, the gift of His Spirit. This new dominion is a dominion of gift. Jesus Christ is Dominus, Lord, and the new management gives.
Here are five descriptions of the gift/gifts as we’ll see throughout Romans.
I read this observation, but it’s good. There is no noun used more in Romans than “God,” and the word God is used with greater frequency than any other book in the New Testament, about 1 out of every 46 words (Morris).
This is what our current rulers, and many of our neighbors, do not get. Paul was “set apart for the gospel of God” (Romans 1:1), he wrote to those “loved by God” (Romans 1:7), and exalted the grace and peace and power of God (Romans 1:7, 16). Gifts come from somewhere, from someone (see also James 1:17).
God exists, and God reigns. This is the only way that it is possible for “all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). And, in fact, individuals are chosen for salvation in Christ, the nation of Israel is chosen to (come back to) salvation Christ, and the great chain of our eternal life is secure as well as the great timeline of human history. God has “predestined (us) to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).
It goes beyond human history. What Jesus has accomplished has effect on earth and in heaven, it has effect in this life and the next. The promise is eternal life.
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)
The gospel lifts up our heads beyond the sun.
This is personal, from and through and to God. Jesus is the Son of His love (Colossians 1:13), and Jesus is the proof of His love for us, and in Jesus we can never be separated from His love.
God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress…? (Nothing) in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Dominus. (Romans 8:35, 39)
The gospel is “the power of God to salvation” (Romans 1:16). The word for “power” is dunamis. It obviously cannot mean dynamite, because no such thing existed in Paul’s day. The gospel is not God’s dynamite, not at least in Paul’s mind.
But, as we acknowledge that dynamite can’t be the right interpretation, I’ve come around to wonder if dynamite isn’t a good illustration.
The gift of God demolishes our lusts. It ruins our ungratefulness and selfishness and disorder and division. It breaks our slavery to brokenness.
But the gift of God does so in such a way that it’s still gift, and bankrupts our self-righteousness. We don’t fight lusts with better rules, we fight lust with the gift. We are not saved by what we don’t do or what we do, not at all. We’re saved in such a way that we have nothing to boast in save Jesus Christ and His righteousness (Romans 3:27).
Gift all the way down and around, gift that destroys our immorality and our morality. Gospel grace leaves us with nothing except everything. Gospel grace potently strips away what we think are our virtues while also putting to death our vices.
Where the gospel of gift has gone, where the dominion of gift has spread, there are more politics without coercion, there are economies based on supply more than demand, there are men who give themselves in responsibility rather than demand service to themselves.
From Him and through Him and to Him are all gifts (per Romans 11:36).
What do we do with this? We say, Amen! We believe. We receive the gift by faith (as we receive the gift of faith itself). We live from faith to faith.
Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the [merciful and gracious and free GIFTS] of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, 1acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. (Romans 12:1, NASB)
And the wrath of God comes on those who refuse to acknowledge God and give Him thanks. Give Him thanks for what? For all the gifts He’s given.
Most of the time I don’t aim to raise more questions than answers, but there are some questions that stimulate more faith than doubt. Let these questions, relentlessly relevant because of the evangel, be gifts to your faith in and obedience to the Lord this week.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31–32, ESV)