The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): You've probably heard of the apostle Paul. He wrote most of the New Testament epistles, including the book of Romans. But did you ever wonder how exactly he came to teach about Jesus Christ with such authority? His authority came not just from knowing who Jesus Christ was; the apostle Paul actually knew Jesus. And knowing Jesus changed him from being a persecutor of the church to being one of its first great leaders.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, teaching you to think and act biblically. Today, we continue our new series in the book of Romans by looking at the life of the apostle Paul. As we learn about Paul's faith, we'll be challenged to live out our own faith beyond the level of mediocrity.

What better way to start off a study on the book of Romans than by learning a little bit more about its author, the apostle Paul? Often when we think of the apostles, we forget that apart from the exceptional work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, they were no different than you or I. And that is something that should inspire us. Turn now to Romans 1, and let's begin.

Dr. James Boice: In the 19th century in England, in the days of deism, there were two friends who were barristers, and their names were Lord Lyttelton and Gilbert West. They were unbelievers, and one day they got together and said, "We should really do something to dispel this myth that calls itself Christianity." They discussed it, and they decided that the Christian religion rests upon two great bulwarks: one, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the other, the conversion and apostleship of the apostle Paul.

Gilbert West said, "I'll write a book disproving the resurrection of Jesus if you, Lyttelton, will write a book disproving the factuality of the apostle Paul's conversion." So they set off to do that. They were a bit rusty in their facts of Christianity, as unbelievers often are. So one said to the other, "If we're going to be honest about this, we really should investigate the evidence." They agreed to do that, and they went off and worked on it for some time.

They held numerous conferences, and at one of these conferences, Lyttelton said to his friend, "Gilbert, there's something that I have had on my mind for some time that I should really share with you. As I've been investigating the evidence for the conversion of the apostle Paul, I've come to feel that there's something to it." And West said to him, "Well, it's good you've spoken that way because as I've begun to investigate the evidence for Christ's resurrection, I've come to feel that there's something to that."

They went on with their work, and when their books were finally finished, they got together and West said to Lyttelton, "As I investigated these things by the standards of legal evidence, I became convinced that Jesus Christ really was raised from the dead. And I have believed on Jesus Christ and have written my book from that perspective." And Lyttelton, for his part, said, "Well, the same thing happened to me. As I investigated the evidence for the conversion of the apostle Paul, I became convinced that the apostle really did see Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus as he claimed he did. And I have written my book also in defense of Christianity."

Those books can be found in good libraries today. Not many Christians are really surprised by those stories, of course, because believing as we do that Christianity is true, we have an innate conviction that if anybody will simply investigate the claims of Christianity with honesty, they will be led to that conclusion. But there is nevertheless something that is a bit surprising about it. We don't have any trouble understanding how West could consider the resurrection of Jesus Christ foundational to Christianity.

The resurrection proves Christ's claims to be God, and all of the other great doctrines of the faith are linked to the resurrection in one way or another. And so to undermine the resurrection undermines Christianity. But the conversion and apostleship of Paul? At first glance, that matter seems to be of much less importance. And yet, like many first glances, that kind of a first consideration is misleading. It is true that Paul was not the founder of Christianity. Jesus Christ is Christianity's only true founder.

But the apostle Paul was so significant in the early days of the Christian church, first as the missionary to the Gentiles and then as the receiver, articulator, and systematizer of Christian theology, that we can well understand that any attack on Paul's credibility undermines the faith at a most strategic point. If Paul did not see the Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus as he claimed he did, and if he did not receive the gospel from him as a special divine revelation, then Paul was a charlatan.

Christianity loses its most important teacher after Jesus Christ, and teaching such as those we find in the book of Romans can simply be disregarded. Now this is the man who confronts us as we begin our study of the book. In the Greek text and in most of our English versions, the word "Paul" was the very first word we find in Romans. And when we think about that, it's really a miracle that that word should be there.

We remember that the apostle Paul was in his early days a fanatical Jew. And as such, he was certainly not sympathetic to a Gentile community, especially not sympathetic to a community which confessed as its Lord this man Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified in Jerusalem for blasphemy against the God of Israel just a few years before. And yet here is Paul, the former fanatical Jew, writing to a largely Gentile church.

And the gospel he has to share with them, as even this first paragraph of the letter makes clear, is the gospel of this very same Jesus. At the very least, you see, this is a miracle of grace, a miracle of very great proportions. Now, who was Paul? In the book of Acts, on an occasion when Paul was defending himself before a Roman commander of the Jerusalem garrison, he said that he was a citizen of "no mean city."

The city was Tarsus in Cilicia, and he said it was no mean city, no ordinary city, in a modest sort of way. Tarsus was a Gentile city. It was the seat of a well-known university. And this means, since Paul lived there and especially since he apparently came from a rather well-to-do family, that in his early days, he presumably had a thoroughly Gentile education. There's some evidence for this because at different points in his writings, he quotes from the Greek poets, from Epimenides, for example, and Menander, as well as some others.

On the other hand, as important as this Gentile or pagan education may be, it is greatly overshadowed by the reality of Paul's education in Jerusalem at the feet of the distinguished Jewish rabbi Gamaliel. Paul went there in his early years and studied under Gamaliel. And then, since his father was a Pharisee before him, he also became a Pharisee and thus entered upon a life determined by this cult of the most strict of all the Jewish sects.

The Pharisees made it their business to adhere strictly to the law and to resist any encroachments from paganism, particularly Gentile or Greek paganism in its Hellenistic form. Paul in these days was so zealous in his commitment to the Pharisaic ideals that he became, as he tells us in several places, a persecutor of the Christian church. He thought that Christians were in grievous error. They were guilty of blasphemy, and he made it his lifelong purpose to stamp the Christian religion out.

In the early days, the apostle Paul used his education and talents to, if he could have been successful at it, destroy Christianity. But after he met the Lord Jesus Christ, he put all of those things in his service. And it's perfectly evident as we read this great book of Romans that here you have a man of extraordinary mental gifts, a man of logic and precision, and a man who is able to gather together facts and systematize them and present them in a great way.

If you have an opportunity for education, you should make it a great purpose in your life to give that over to the Lord Jesus Christ to be used by him as he determines. Now I've said that the apostle Paul was a thoroughly educated man, but I want to point out that he was also a thoroughly converted man. This leads us to the first of three phrases in Romans 1:1 that Paul uses in terms of a self-description to introduce himself to the believers at Rome.

He says that he is a servant of Jesus Christ. One of the greatest books about the apostle Paul and his theology that's ever been written is *The Origin of Paul's Religion* by J. Gresham Machen. Machen was a great scholar who in the earlier years of this century was grappling with the liberal theories that were coming out of Germany. The German scholars were aware, as Lord Lyttelton was, that the faith and teaching of the apostle Paul was a great bulwark of Christianity.

But they didn't believe in a supernatural Jesus. The religion of Paul was supernatural, and so they found themselves with the hopeless task of trying to account for Paul's religion without a supernatural base. And there were a number of theories devised. A great deal of work was done in this area, and Machen was attacking it in this book, which was originally a series of lectures given in Virginia. And he did a number of things.

On the positive side, he showed that the traditions concerning the teachings of Jesus Christ were sound, and that the apostle Paul did not invent any of these things, but that he was one in his convictions with the apostles and that the other apostles were one with the teachings of Jesus. He showed that Paul was well-grounded in his faith in the resurrection. Then, on the negative side, Paul did not, according to Machen, and could not have gotten his religion anywhere else.

And so he showed that it couldn't have come from his rabbinic traditions, and it certainly didn't come from paganism. That was a great achievement, and from a scholarly point of view, this was a magnificent work. And yet, as I read this book of Machen's, I'm convinced that his greatest contribution comes not in that long and very careful argument which he develops in more than 300 pages, but incidentally throughout and especially at the end as he draws his argument to a close.

Because what Machen wanted to show is that the heart of Paul's religion was not, as we would say, a mere conviction of the factualness of Christianity, important as that was. It was not merely that Paul was convinced on the basis of sound evidence in his contact with the original disciples that Jesus was risen from the dead. But rather, the heart of Paul's religion was in the fact that he had been captivated by the Lord Jesus Christ personally.

To put it another way, Paul had come to love Jesus, and therefore he wanted his whole life to be given over to him. As Machen got to the end of his book, he wrote his summation in these words: "Paulinism, that which he was trying to explain, is to be accounted for by the love of Paul for his Savior. The religion of Paul was not founded upon a complex of ideas derived from Judaism or from paganism. It was founded upon the historical Jesus.

But the historical Jesus upon whom it was founded was not the Jesus of modern reconstruction, but the Jesus of the whole New Testament and of Christian faith. Not a teacher who survived only in the memory of his disciples, but the Savior who, after his redeeming work was done, still lived and could still be loved." Now I maintain that that's what the apostle Paul is saying as he introduces himself at the start of this great letter.

Paul says that he is a servant of Christ Jesus, just as throughout his writings he fills his heart and mind and speech with Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul could have introduced himself in other ways, after all. He could have introduced himself by his achievements. He could have referred to his pedigree, talked about his education. He could have listed his degrees, could have given a list of all the churches that he had been used to found.

He could even have talked about his writings because Romans presumably was not the first of his epistles. Paul does none of these things. It's not because he's ashamed of these things in their own place. He talks about them. They're facts of his life. But he doesn't refer to them here simply because in his thinking, something far more important takes their place. Jesus is the one who takes their place.

Paul was a follower of Jesus, and so here as elsewhere, he introduces himself as Christ's servant. It doesn't make any difference where he's writing or what he says. He does the same thing everywhere. Some of Paul's letters are doctrinal in nature. Romans is a key example. Some deal with problems in the churches. First and Second Corinthians and Galatians are an example of that category of writing. Some books are personal in nature, the pastoral epistles.

Some are incidental letters like Philemon. But it doesn't make any difference what problem he's dealing with or whom it is that he's addressing. The apostle Paul always is speaking of Jesus. You may notice, for example, that in just the first seven verses of this introductory portion of his letter, Paul refers to the Lord Jesus Christ by name, pronoun, descriptive phrase, or title eight times. He refers to himself as a servant of Christ Jesus.

He talks about "his Son," that is God's Son, in verse 2. He calls him a descendant of David. He speaks of him as the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, Jesus Christ, and in verse 7, the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus simply filled his thinking. Now it's worth stopping to apply that as well. In my judgment, one of the weaknesses of the contemporary church is that we are not, as Paul was, really lovers of Jesus Christ.

We have lots of other things. We have programs and plans and personalities. We have buildings and books and bargains, but we have very little of Jesus. We build our edifice by human means, and what is lacking is that kind of commitment which makes Christianity deep and satisfying to the soul. In other words, we have a shallow faith. It's not that we disbelieve these things, at least in the evangelical church, we do.

But what we need in the churches is that heart for Jesus that so evidently beat within the apostle. There are a number of other things that are taught to us by this phrase and which it accomplishes at this place in the letter. Let me suggest a few others. They're worth noting. It introduces the apostle Paul in the same category as any other Christian. And that's a way of saying, first of all, that it introduces Paul as a simple believer.

This phrase "a servant of Jesus Christ" describes Christians. A servant is one who has been bought to serve. One of the great words of the Christian vocabulary is the word "redemption." Paul is going to use it significantly in the third chapter as he begins to explain what the gospel means. Redemption means to be bought in the marketplace, to be bought as a slave. Now, in Christianity, it's a special kind of slavery.

To be bought by Jesus Christ is in the most fundamental sense to be set free. And yet it's nevertheless true that this phrase "redemption" or this title "servant" is an appropriate way to refer to those who are Christians. Peter wrote about it, saying you're bought with a price, not with perishable things like silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. And he makes the conclusion: "Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God's."

So when Paul says here, "Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus," he is at least saying, "I am just like you. I am a Christian too. I am one who has been bought by Jesus Christ and I want to serve him." The second thing he emphasizes is that his special relationship to Christ—and it follows from that that it is also his relationship to other Christians—is one of service. He's not there to be served, but to serve.

And he wants to serve them in his capacity as an apostle. I'm trying to apply this to the church today, and this is an obvious area in which we need to hear what Paul is saying. One of the weaknesses of our churches today is that we expect people to serve us rather than existing in the world as servants. Not long ago, I was talking with a good friend of mine who approximately 25 years ago was used of God along with some other men to establish an independent Bible church in Texas.

They began that because of a recognized need for such a church in their community. And according to my friend, for the first 15 years, they thought of themselves as really the only true church, or at least the only good one. And they thought that the way the work of Christ would best be served in their area would be if other people left their churches and came and joined their own particular fellowship. My friend says that during those first 15 years, that church grew from an initial congregation of approximately 60 people to a maximum size of 150.

He says they were underwhelmed by the magnitude of God's blessing upon them in those early years. They began to think about it. Instead of saying, "Well, we're right after all, and after all, the church of Jesus Christ really isn't supposed to grow," they began to ask themselves if something might be wrong. And they took a new tack. They said instead of expecting other people to leave their fellowships and join us, let's think of ourselves as Christ's servants in this community.

And let's ask, what is being done in our city that really is being done for Jesus Christ? What is good? What is really Christian work? And then whenever we see that, let's go and help it all we can. And if people leave our church to go and join another fellowship, we just won't count that a negative. We'll say that's wonderful. And we won't fret at all if someone else gets the credit. And then he describes what happened.

In the next 10 years after this 15-year period of near stagnation, this church, which at the beginning of the 10-year period numbered about 150 members, grew to its present size of 2,000. Now you see there's a lesson there, and it's the lesson that Paul is giving us in this first phrase. Christians are here to serve. Or to be even more basic than that, it's the teaching of Jesus Christ, who said of himself the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many, and who said to his disciples, "The one among you who would be greatest must be your servant, and he who would excel must be the servant of all."

The third thing that is taught by this phrase is that above all else, Paul was a servant of Jesus Christ. That is, it was as his servant above all that he functioned in the world. Now that leads to the second of these three descriptive phrases. The first, a servant of Jesus Christ. The second, called to be an apostle. What is an apostle? I suppose that's one of the most misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary.

Many people think of that word "apostle" as being more or less synonymous with the word "disciple." That's a great misunderstanding, and to understand what an apostle is is really important for understanding much about the nature of the Christian faith itself. All of the apostles were disciples, but not all of the disciples were apostles. If you read of Christ's calling of the disciples in the Gospels, you'll find a number of passages in which it tells us that among those many disciples who followed Jesus, the Lord picked certain ones to fulfill an apostolic role.

Well, what then is an apostle? Well, the best answer to that comes from the first chapter of the book of Acts, beginning in verse 15, where after the death of Jesus and his resurrection, and after the death of Judas, who killed himself because of his role in betraying Jesus, the apostles elected a 12th apostle to make up their apostolic number. Peter was the spokesman on that occasion, and he said it's necessary that there be 12 apostles and we need to elect someone.

So therefore, let's pick someone who, number one, was an eyewitness of Jesus Christ during the days of his ministry and who, secondly, was chosen by Jesus for the role. Now they had two men who fit the first category. One was a man named Barsabbas, who also went by the name of Justus, and the second was a man named Matthias. They had seen the risen Lord, so they qualified in the first category.

And then after they had nominated these two men, they drew lots, which was a way of saying, "Let's have the Lord Jesus himself choose the one he wants to be an apostle." And Matthias was chosen, and it tells us in that text that he was numbered with the apostles. But now even that doesn't say quite enough. Because although the disciples provided the number from which the Lord Jesus Christ chose 12 to be apostles, and the chief task of those apostles was to witness to Jesus, we remember if we put that in the broadest context, that at the end of each of the Gospels and at the beginning of the book of Acts, there's what we call the Great Commission.

And the thrust of the Great Commission is that all Christians everywhere are to witness. So we ask the question, if all Christians everywhere are to witness, in what sense were the apostles special witnesses? And the answer to that comes from the way they themselves talk about their ministry. One clear example is the opening chapter of Galatians. And it's clear because the apostleship of Paul was under attack in the Galatian churches, so he's defending it in those opening verses of the book.

The very first verse says, "Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ, not by man nor through man, but by Jesus Christ." So he makes the point that he got his position not by any kind of apostolic succession or any blessing that might be conferred to him by other human beings, but directly from Jesus Christ. So that's what makes an apostle, one who was called by Jesus. And then a few verses further on, when he begins to talk about the gospel, he says it's a gospel which I received by revelation, not by man, but by revelation of Jesus Christ.

And on the basis of that, he pronounces a curse or an anathema upon anyone who teaches any other gospel. You see what's involved. It's not merely in the case of the apostles that they are witnesses to the historical Christ, but they are also called and empowered by Christ, and the gospel was revealed to them in such a way that when they spoke as apostles, they spoke with God's authority. In other words, what they said had the same effect as Scripture, and as we know it in the books of the New Testament, eventually became the Scriptures that the Christian church most used.

This is what an apostle was. So when Paul says here, "I am called to be an apostle," he is saying something not merely about his role as a servant of Jesus Christ, but about the book that we're to study. Let's take that seriously at the beginning. How do we consider this great book of Romans? Oh, we can approach it as a merely human book, of course, and that's not altogether bad.

It's a good book. It's worth studying like any other book. We can profit from it. But if we profit greatly, the way to profit is by receiving it as what it truly is: a book given by inspiration from God through the apostle Paul, and therefore a book that contains within it the very words of God, a book that is to be obeyed just as surely as we would be obliged to obey God if he would speak to us directly from heaven in audible words.

Well, there's one final phrase. Paul introduces himself as a servant of Christ Jesus, an apostle, and finally in the third phrase, he says also, "I am set apart for the gospel of God." It's interesting that he should use that word "set apart" or "separated" because that's the meaning of the word "Pharisee," which is what he was in the early years. The Pharisees were ones who were set apart, separated ones. And they took that very seriously.

They separated themselves from other people, for one thing, certainly from sinners. When they walked down the street, if they saw a publican or any other sinner coming toward them, they'd cross over to the other side. They didn't want even their robes to brush the sinner. They separated themselves by their dietary laws and by their ceremonial washings. There was a great list of things that Pharisees would not do.

If Paul had described himself in those days, he would have used precisely this word. He would have said, "I am separated from all these things that are sinful, all these bad practices, all these people who don't observe the law." But as a result of that approach to religion, he was self-righteous, cruel, self-satisfied, and very much filled with human pride. And then he met Jesus.

And when he met Jesus, as he did on the road to Damascus, all this great castle of self-righteousness that he had built up collapsed, and he found himself separated, but now separated in an entirely different sense. Before that, there were all these things he was separated from. Now, having seen Jesus, he was separated not from but to Jesus and to Jesus's gospel. Oh, if you'd said to Paul, "Paul, do you do all those things, all those sinful things that are in the Bible?" Of course, he would not have done them.

Lots of things that Paul didn't do. He certainly didn't indulge in fleshly sins. He didn't lie or cheat or steal or commit adultery. But Paul would never have described those things as privations. He would never have said, "Oh, this is a big long list of things I don't do." Paul would have said, "No, you see it's quite different now. I exist for something. I exist for Jesus. I want to serve him and I exist for his gospel. And so my whole life is separated under that high calling."

I wonder if that's true of you. Oh, there are things we shouldn't do as Christians. The Bible mentions them. But the secret to a holy and prosperous life is not in making a list of things not to do, but in coming to love Jesus and separating yourself to his gospel and the sharing of that gospel in the world. Those who will do that will be blessed by him, and they'll enter upon a life of such fullness and blessing that not only will they find joy, but they'll be a source of it to other men and women.

Let us pray. Father, we ask for your blessing upon our study. We pray that you would bear that home upon our hearts so that what we have read and thought about together, which comes from your word, might form us this week and so set us upon a path of godly service based on love for Jesus that others around us might see that and be drawn not to ourselves, but to him. For we pray in Jesus' holy name. Amen.

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