PAUL’S LETTER TO THE CHRISTIANS IN ROME

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Verses 1-13: We are all one in Christ’s love

What Paul writes about next is not very different. Still, the thought that we are one in the love of Christ is clear in verses 5 and 6. If we remember this, it will help us with the rest of what Paul writes.

So in verse 1, we have to remember why we are strong. If we are strong, then it is because God has made us strong. He has made us strong so that we can help people who are weak. At Rome, there were some Christians who were Jews and some who were not. The Jews might seem to be weak to the others. Yet we may be sure that they could see truths which others could not see. They could share this truth. (Verse 2) Each of us should please the other Christian, not himself. If we know anything about the Christian life, we shall know that this is true. It is when we try to please others that we find joy. We do not find joy when we please ourselves.

Now Paul says that because we are ‘all one in Christ’, we want to see other Christians built up. [15.1] We want them to grow up into ‘bigger’ Christians. We may be sadly tested. We may say ‘I am the big man in this church. All the others are little people. That means that I can have things the way I want them. I want it to stay that way’. How wrong that is! We should want the ‘little’ Christians to grow, even if one day they are ‘bigger’ than we are.

In verse 3, Paul does something that he has not done before in this letter. Christ is our example. We want to be like Him. Paul has written before about Who Jesus is. He has written about His work, that is, what He did for us when He died on the cross. Paul has written about His power and His coming again. There are people who only think about Jesus as their example. We can see here that the other things we know about Jesus come before His example. Still, Paul now says we do have the example of Christ. Paul uses some words from Psalm 69:9. There is much more in this Psalm which speaks about Jesus, but there are some verses which do not. Paul seems to put in these words so that we remember how much Jesus suffered.

So in verse 4, Paul tells us why God gave us the Old Testament. When we read it we find help to go on in the Christian life. And like Jesus, we are willing to go on in times when we suffer. We do not try to find wrong ways to get away from suffering. We gain hope from Scripture because it tells us about Jesus Christ. Then in verse 5, Paul begins a prayer. He prays that to these other things, God will add ‘a spirit of unity’. This is rather like Paul’s teaching in Philippians 2:2. The Christians in Rome are not all alike. They seem to belong to perhaps ten or more groups in the city. Paul does not want them only to agree on the words which they use in worship (verse 6). He wants their oneness to go much deeper than that. They are to be one in heart.

After this prayer, we come to verse 7. We begin to see why it is that we are one. Christ accepted us when we were sinners. Christ did not accept any of us because we were good or very clever. So we should accept one another as sinners. We are all sinners who need Christ to save us. We are sinners who forgive each other. We can see that Paul now has left behind what he had to say about ‘weak’and ‘strong’.

We are not quite sure how the last part of the verse fits in here. We may bring praise to God because we accept one another. Or it may be that Christ accepts us so that we may praise God.

In verse 8, Paul really does come toward the end of what he has to say. He no longer writes about how we should live the Christian life. He writes about what God has done for the Jews. Then we see how this fits in with what God does for other nations.

1. Christ has become (or ‘became’) a servant of the Jewish people. Paul calls them ‘the circumcision’. This means ‘the Jews’. Yet it shows that Paul remembers that they have been God’s people ever since the time of Abraham. The word ‘servant’ here does not mean ‘slave’. It is more like our word ‘deacon’.

2. God had long ago made promises to people like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are ‘the patriarchs’ or ‘fathers’ of the Jewish people.

3. Long ages passed after God gave these promises to them. God did not ‘full fill’ or fulfil His promises. So people might well ask. ‘Did God really mean what He said when He gave His promises?’

4. No one needs to ask such questions any longer. Jesus came and kept God’s promises. He filled them full with meaning that no-one had ever guessed at. God was faithful to His Word. What Jesus did was the proof of this. Yet, God gave the promises to the Jews (verse 9). So the other nations did not have the promises. So now the Gentiles give glory to God for His mercy to them.

Paul next uses four verses from the Old Testament. These verses all speak about the ‘Gentiles’ or nations. They are not promises which God gave. Only one of them speaks at all about the Jewish people. The first one is in verse 9. Paul here uses words from Psalm 18:49. You will also find the whole of this Psalm in 2 Samuel 22. This verse is verse 50 in that chapter. David wrote this Psalm and it speaks to us about what Christ would suffer and about the ‘glory that would follow’. Psalm 22 and perhaps Psalm 69 speak more clearly about what Christ would suffer. Still, this verse speaks to us about the glory of Christ. ‘The Gentiles’ here are Christians from all nations. Christ is among them and He praises God, His Father.

The second of these verses is verse 10. Here Paul uses some words from Deuteronomy 32:43. They add to what Paul said in verse 9. The nations share the joy of the Jews. [15.2] The third verse is verse 11. This comes from Psalm 117:1. This Psalm is the shortest Psalm. Now it is not only Christ but all the nations who also join in praise to God.

Then in verse 12 we have words from Isaiah 11:10. The first ten verses of Isaiah 11 all speak about our Lord Jesus Christ. Isaiah wrote them about 700 years before Jesus came into the world. Jesse was the father of King David. Our Lord Jesus is ‘David’s greater Son’. So it is Jesus who will ‘spring up’. The Jewish people were like the stump of a tree which someone had cut down. There seemed to be no life there. Yet after all, there still is life there. Jesus springs up. So Jesus is the One who will rule the nations.

Most of the men who rule the nations do it to make money. They want to be rich. So they make the nations poor. They do not give any hope. Jesus is not like this. He gives us the hope of glory. Yet perhaps the hope here is not the hope of glory. It is the hope that the Jews will be one in Christ with the nations. It is the hope of God’s goodness to the nations where the people believe the Good News. There are many more verses like these in the Old Testament. See Psalm 86:9 for example. Paul chose these verses to show that there would be a New Testament church. It would be made up from people of many nations. The Jews might be there, or they might not.

So (verse 13) we put our faith and our trust in God. We do not trust our own faith! We remember what Paul said in 14:17. Our God is the God Who gives us hope. He is the God in whom we fix our hope. We are not just to be full of joy, peace and hope. We are to have far more of these than we can hold. See Psalm 23:5. Our joy, peace and hope are to run out from us so that other people can share them. And this is to happen by the gracious power of the Holy Spirit. We do need to ask ourselves whether our Christian life is really like this.

So with these wonderful words we come to the end of the main part of Paul’s letter. He has completed his teaching. The rest of the letter tells us first what Paul has done in the past. Then it tells us what he hopes to do. Then it tells us about some of his friends.

Verses 14 - 22: Paul and the work he has done

As we come to this last main part of this great letter, we need to remember:-

1. That for several years there had been hardly any Jews in Rome. They had been sent away about A.D.49 by Claudius, the Emperor. There was no Jewish worship.

2. So the Christians who were not Jews were left on their own. No doubt some of them became leaders. They did things in their own way. More people in Rome believed the Good News.

3. Then Claudius died. Many Jews came back to Rome. Some of them were Christians. They had met up with Paul and his friends. When they came back to Rome it was not so easy to get on with the Christians who had been there all the time. They were older now and wiser. Perhaps they had more power in the city of Rome.

4. Paul may even have heard from some of his friends. They told him of their problems. It had been fairly easy for the Christians who were not Jews. The Jews who did not believe in Jesus all had to leave Rome too.

5. So Paul wrote this letter to bring the Christians together again.

6. He also wrote it because he hoped to come to Rome himself. He wanted help from the Christians in Rome so that he could go on to Spain.

7. Paul did not get to Rome as soon as he expected. So there was a gap of two or three years. His letter reached Rome. Then, some time later, Paul arrived.

8. While the Jews were not allowed in Rome, Paul himself could not go there. He was a Jew. [15.3]

Paul is rather careful now. He is really sure that the Roman Christians are all right. Other Christian people think the same way too. (Verse 15) Perhaps he feels that he has spoken rather strongly. After all, there were people among the Roman Christians who mattered. Paul does not know them, and he ought to honour them. What he has written is not new to them. And he writes like this because God has called him to be the apostle to the nations.

In verse 16 there is a picture. There is something rather like this in Philippians 2:17.
2 Timothy 4:6 is not quite the same. Paul’s work is to preach the Good News to the nations. Once perhaps they had been ’unclean’ unlike the Jews. Now they are clean. The Christians in the nations are like an offering or sacrifice to God. They are an offering which will please God. He will accept it. It may be that Paul is the priest who makes the offering. It may rather be that Christ is the priest who makes the offering. Paul is His ‘assistant’ or helper, like the Levites in the Old Testament.

Notice that this is one of a number of places in the New Testament which speak of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. There are at least ten of these. The best known is 2 Corinthians 13:14. We are often told that the New Testament does not speak about the Holy Trinity. The word itself is not there, it is true. The truth is there however. [15.4] See verses 12 and 13 of this Chapter.

(Verse 17) Paul can speak about what he has done himself to spread the Good News. He does not need (verse 18) to say what other people have done. Christ has used Paul to lead the people from many nations to obey God. That means to trust Jesus to save them. What Paul has said is to preach the Good News, as he says at the end of verse 19. What he has done is ‘signs and miracles’. He has not done these by his own power, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. We do not know about many ‘signs and wonders’. There must have been many more which we do not read about in the Book of Acts.

We can read about Paul’s visits to Jerusalem in Acts 11:30 and 12:25; Acts 15:1-35 and from Acts 21:17 to 23:31; and in Galatians 1:18-21. Paul did not go south or east from Jerusalem. His work was to the north and west. It was in the countries along the north side of the Mediterranean Sea. These were the lands where most people spoke Greek. Jerusalem was the limit of Paul’s ministry to the east and south. Then he speaks about ‘Illyricum’. We cannot be sure that Paul means that he had been into Illyricum. He may only mean that he had been the whole way through Macedonia to where Illyricum began. This would most likely fit in at the time of Acts 20:2. Illyricum was the part of the Roman Empire to the east of the Adriatic Sea. The coast and islands were called Dalmatia. See 2 Timothy 4:10; this was some years later. Illyricum was rather wild country where few people would speak Greek.There were few cities, so it does not seem likely that Paul preached there. He speaks about it here because it is the closest he has ever come to Rome up to this time. [15.5]

(Verse 20) In Acts 2:8-11 there is a list of the parts of the world where the first Christians lived. We can follow Paul’s travels on a map. We can see that he went to other parts of the world to plant churches. He did not go to places where there were already Christians. The church at Ephesus was rather special, see Acts 19:20,21. Paul thinks of his work as building the churches up, just as our work is to build up one another. See 14:19 and 15:2. Paul always wanted to preach and plant churches where the Good News was not known. So in verse 21 he uses the words of Isaiah 52:15.

Verse 22 is very much like what Paul said in 1:13. It may mean that Paul had been so busy in the east that he had had no time to go to Rome. He not only planted churches but he had to care for them when things went wrong. But Paul may mean that because there were already some Christians in Rome, the need for him to go there was not so great. There were still places where there were no Christians at all. It may rather be that the church at Jerusalem kept in touch with the Christians in Rome. Some of the other apostles might have gone to Rome now and then. Paul had to think about how they would feel if he went to Rome. Perhaps this was why he had to go to Jerusalem first. He wanted to see the other apostles before he went to Rome.

Chapter 15: 23-28: Paul’s plans: Rome and Spain

Paul tells his readers now how things have changed. He seems a little sad in verse 23. He is in Corinth. This is a city where he has planted a church. His work here is done. The church now has other leaders. The church has grown up. Christian teachers will often find that this happens. The good people who owe them so much quickly forget them. Paul’s next journey will take him to Jerusalem.

We can read about this journey in Acts 20:3; 21:15. The Book of Acts does not say anything about the reason for this journey. We only learn about this from verses 25-27 here and from some other places in Paul’s letters. Paul was ready to take some money which the churches in Greece had given to help the church in Jerusalem. The people in the Jerusalem church seem to have been poor. The reason may be this. Jews from all over the world came to visit Jerusalem. They came for the great Jewish feasts. They spent money and this helped people in Jerusalem. It is likely that they would not stay with people in Jerusalem who were Christians.

We shall have to say more about the collection when we look at verse 31.

Something else has changed. Paul does not plan to go to Rome to work there. His plan now is to come to Rome and to go on to Spain. He will need the help of the Christians in Rome. He does want to see the Christians in Rome, but this wish is not new. What is new is the plan to go to Spain. (Verse 24)

Until A.D.70, there were hardly any Jews in Spain. So Paul would not be able to go to the synagogues first. He would have to preach to people who knew nothing about the Old Testament. He would mostly have to use Latin when he spoke. Few people would know Greek. There would be other languages too. It would have been easier for Paul to go to Gaul in the south of what is now France. The journey would not have been so long. There were more cities there and some people might speak Greek. In 2 Timothy 4:10, Crescens may just have gone to Gaul not Galatia. Most of the north of Spain would still be quite wild.

There must have been a reason why Paul wanted to go to Spain. It may just be this. Jesus spoke to His eleven disciples just before He went back to heaven. See Acts 1:8. There Jesus says that they will preach the Good News ‘to the ends of the earth’. See Isaiah 49:6 and perhaps Psalm 19:4. The great city of Gades was in Spain. It is now Cadiz. People would think of that as ‘the end of the earth’. It was beyond ‘the Pillars of Hercules’, which we call ‘the Straits of Gibraltar’. It was on the Atlantic Ocean. It was a rich trading city. People went there because of the old stories about the Greek ‘strong man’, the hero Hercules. [15:6]

Paul will have known the words of Jesus. You will find that he even uses the words of Isaiah 49:6. This is in Acts 13:47. If no one else had preached the Good News in Spain, he would want to. One or two old writers thought that Paul did reach Spain. This is unlikely. Such a journey would have taken a long time. We cannot find time for this in Paul’s travels. And it is nearly another two hundred years before we hear much about churches in Spain. If Paul had planted churches we would probably have heard something about them.

If we look at 1 Corinthians 16:1-3, we can see how long Paul had worked on the collection. He began in Galatia in Acts 18:23. The names of the men who went to Jerusalem with Paul are in Acts 20:4 although Acts says nothing about the money for Jerusalem. (Verse 27) The Jews have shared the Good News with the other nations. Now the nations share their money with the Jews. (Verse 28) Paul has now decided that he will go to Jerusalem himself. When he wrote 1 Corinthians 16:4, he was still not sure about this. So once again (verse 29) he says that he will not make a special journey to visit Rome. He hopes to see the Roman Christians on his way from Jerusalem to Spain. We know from the last chapters of the Book of Acts that God’s will was quite different from this. So the letter reached Rome more than two years before Paul did. Verse 29 is rather like 1:11. Paul will bring with him the blessing which Christ gives, but he will meet with it in Rome as well.

Once again in verse 30, Paul speaks of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. See verse 16. Many Christians today have to ‘struggle’ as Paul did. It is an honour to us to be able to join in their struggle. More than this, our prayers can be a real help to them. (Verse 31) The money that Paul and his friends would take to Jerusalem was not the first. See Acts 11:30.There Paul and Barbabas take the money to the elders of the Jerusalem church. Nothing is said there about the deacons or the apostles. This time, Paul and the others arrived in Jerusalem (Acts 21:17). Then in the next verse they see James, the Lord’s brother, and the elders. The only place which speaks about money is verse 24.

Here in Romans 15:31, Paul asks for prayer. This is first because he knows he may have trouble with the Jews who do not believe. We can read what did happen in Acts 21:27-23:22. Then there is a second prayer which he asks for. This is that the Christians in Jerusalem will accept the money which he has collected. We can see that Paul is not sure what will happen.

The way in which we give money matters. A little which we give in love is worth more than a large amount where there is no love. See Mark 12:41-44 and 2 Corinthians 8:12 and 9:7. Remember Romans 12:8 and Acts 20:35. If the Jerusalem church took this money in a bad spirit it would lose most of its worth. Some of the Jerusalem church might think:- ‘This is like the temple tax which the Jews send to Jerusalem’. Some of them did not like Paul. Some of them were not happy about the churches which he had begun. We just do not know what happened. Yet we should learn that we need to have love in our hearts when we give. We also need to have kind and gracious hearts when people give something to us.

In verse 33 Paul asks for a third prayer. The Book of Acts tells us how Paul did come to Rome in the end. He was a prisoner of the Romans. He spend two years at Caesarea. A storm destroyed the ship in which he sailed. Then he had to spend a winter in Malta. Paul was still not free, but we would like to think that the Christians who met him (Acts 28:15) knew this letter. There was some joy in that, and in the work that Paul was able to do in Rome.