The Bible Study Hour

Announcer: Have you ever felt ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ? We all have from time to time, but why is that?

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, preparing you to think and act biblically. Today we continue our series on the Book of Romans called The Power of Salvation.

For the first few chapters, we've been exploring the impact and importance of the phrase justification by faith only. So, do you find yourself sometimes ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ? According to the Apostle Paul, there is nothing to be ashamed of in the gospel message. But why is that? Let's find out. Turn with us now to Romans chapter 1, verse 16, and we'll see why Paul was not ashamed.

Dr. James Boice: Romans 1:16, I am not ashamed of the gospel. What an extraordinary statement that is from the Apostle Paul. When we read it, the first thing we want to ask is, well, why should he even have thought of being ashamed of the gospel? Why should something so glorious and grand ever be thought shameful?

If we ask those questions, however, it's probably because we have never thought very deeply or honestly about it. Which of us hasn't been ashamed of spiritual things at one time or another? We know why, it's because the world is hostile to spiritual things. And although we should be above that and not care for it, generally, we're far more worldly, far more attuned to the way the world thinks than we like to imagine. And so when the world is hostile, we're ashamed of that against which it shows its opposition.

It's always been that way, it certainly was true in Paul's day. In the day of the apostles, when they went out to preach the gospel throughout the Roman world, they were met by opposition on every hand. The Greeks, our pagans, generally thought that Christianity was atheism. That's because they worshiped many gods, and the Christians denied the existence of those gods, maintaining, as did the Jews, that there is but one God only. And so the pagans said, well, they're denying the gods, they're atheistic.

The Jews, on their part, thought that Christians were setting out to destroy the law because they were propounding, as Paul clearly does in Romans, a way of salvation that's apart from the keeping of the law. The Jews said, something like that is wrong. It repudiates what God has clearly given to us through Moses, and besides it will lead to licentiousness. If you're not saved by keeping the law, that means you're able to do anything you please. Christians are going to bring immorality to the world. Both of them thought that Christianity was foolishness, and besides, as both Jews and Gentiles said, Christians were disturbers of the peace. They were going around from community to community trying to overturn the way things had been done down through the long preceding centuries.

Was the Apostle Paul ever tempted to be ashamed of the gospel? I don't know, he may have been. We do know that Timothy was because he writes to Timothy on one occasion to tell him, Timothy, don't be ashamed of the gospel or of me its messenger.

It's not altogether different today. We live in an age that prides itself on a certain measure of religious tolerance, and as long as you keep quiet about your faith, people will keep quiet about it too. But the world is still the world, and the world in its nature is hostile to God and his gospel. And so wherever this gospel of salvation by grace through Jesus Christ is made known, hostility inevitably erupts. And if you've not known that, and if as a result you've never been tempted to be ashamed of the gospel, it's not probably, as Martin Lloyd Jones suggests, because you're such an exceptional Christian, but because you've never really understood the gospel fully. Where the gospel is understood and proclaimed, the world is hostile, and none of us like ridicule.

And yet you see, Paul's point is that he wasn't ashamed of the gospel. Oh, maybe he had been tempted to be, and Timothy was, but nobody should be, and to that end in these verses he gives us a number of reasons why he was not ashamed. That's what I'd like to focus on, why was Paul not ashamed of this gospel?

The first reason why Paul was not ashamed of the gospel is involved in the meaning of the word gospel itself. Gospel means good news, and nobody should be ashamed of a beneficial proclamation. We can imagine the opposite, how someone might be the bearer of bad news and might be ashamed of that.

You can imagine, for example, a policeman visiting a home and having to tell the father in that home that his son has just been arrested for breaking into a neighbor's house and stealing her possessions. He might be reluctant or dismayed to have to bring that news to the family. Or a doctor might find himself in a similar situation, he has a patient, they've done tests, the tests are negative, bad tests. And now he has to come to the patient and say that the results are most discouraging and that this man or this woman doesn't have long to live, he might well be dismayed at having to say that.

Or again, here's somebody who has been overtaken in a serious moral lapse, he now has to confess it, we can understand how he might be ashamed to do it. But you see, that's not the case with the gospel, the gospel is good news, as a matter of fact, it's not only good news, it's the best of all possible news. It tells us how God has made it possible for us to get right with him. And for that reason, if for no other reason, we shouldn't be ashamed to make the good news known.

The second reason why Paul is not ashamed of the gospel is that it's about salvation. You can think of all kinds of good news that might be good, but not necessarily all that significant or overwhelming. But that's not the case here. This concerns salvation, and salvation is what we need. The background for this, of course, is our condition apart from God's grace toward us in Jesus Christ, which is what Paul begins to talk about in these next verses of his letter. Apart from this gospel of salvation, we are in desperate straight, we are lost, as he said in writing to the Ephesians, we are without hope and without God in the world.

We have sinned, and therefore we're subject to sin's penalty, that is, judgment by God. We are trapped by sin and its power, so we're unable to get free, we're polluted by sin, so our lives are fragmented, we're unable to cleanse ourselves and set ourselves upon a way that brings blessing. We can talk about it in other terms, sin has separated us from God, God is the source of every good gift, so if we're separated from him, we're cut off from the source of all blessings. We're unable to communicate with God.

And yet, this is where the good news comes in, we're unable to communicate with God, but he's communicated with us, we're unable to reach out to God, but he has reached out to us, we're unable to save ourselves, but he has saved us and he has done that through the work of Jesus Christ. The Apostle writes about that in a somewhat comprehensive way in the 30th verse of 1 Corinthians 1, where he says Christ, as God's answer, is made unto us wisdom and reconciliation and holiness and redemption. Everything we need is in Jesus.

The third reason why the Apostle was not ashamed of the gospel is that it's God's way of salvation. That's worth stressing because that is what he is saying, it's the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

You see, if it were something other than that, if it were not God's way of salvation, but rather our way of salvation, we could hardly rejoice in it because human ways of salvation are all either foolish or inadequate. We don't lack for ideas of how we can improve ourselves or make life better. As a matter of fact, in our day people get rich with self-help schemes. Ways to realize your human potential, or ways to get rich in the stock market, or ways to make friends and get along with people, or whatever it may be, people who have these schemes tap into felt needs on the part of people who for one reason or another feel inadequate.

But the schemes themselves are not adequate. Oh, they may help in a certain area, somebody who practices them might actually be able to get along with other people a little better, or have a little better self-image, or perhaps make a certain amount of money, or succeed in this or that particular profession. But that's not the big problem, the big problem is our relationship to God, and in that respect all of these things are inadequate. God's way of salvation reaches us where we need to be reached and does for us what we are unable to do for ourselves.

The Apostle Paul seems to have written about that or thought about that in two different ways, as he contrasts what God has done with what we tend to do when left to ourselves. One thing we try to do often when we're left to ourselves is please God by good works. Most of the religions of the world are this kind of religion. They say the way to make it is by doing good things, in Paul's day, as he wrote, writing largely to Jewish people, it was a question of keeping the law. The law tells you what you should do, and so you do it, that's the idea.

What Paul points out is that having the law is no solution because in ourselves we can't keep it. We can't keep God's law, we can't even keep our own laws. The laws we make as a government, or the laws we make individually, or the New Year's resolutions we propound, we just can't keep them. And so the law is inadequate. Paul writes about that in the eighth chapter of Romans, making a contrast between the law and our failure to keep it, and what God did in us to fulfill the law's demands. Here's the way he says it, verse 3.

What the law was powerless to do, in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the sinful nature, but according to the spirit. You see what he's saying? He's saying that by trying to keep the law, all of us have failed.

God has done what needs to be done in Jesus Christ, Jesus came and died for us, so the demands of the law in a legal sense were met, we have been punished for our sins in Christ. But then importantly, and in addition to that, God sends his spirit to live in us, so now from within being transformed, we actually do begin to live up to the law's standards. That's a glorious thing, but God, you see, doing in us what we can't do for ourselves.

The other way in which Paul thinks about this and writes about it is in terms of wisdom. I suppose it's because he had so much to do with the Greeks, when he was speaking to Jews, as he did often in the synagogues, he spoke about the law because that's how Jews thought they were going to be saved. But when he went into the Greek marketplace and began to talk to the Greek philosophers, they thought that the way they were saved was by their wisdom. It went along with Greek philosophy, that the thing to do was emancipate the mind, that the mind was the divine spark within, we had to get rid of the body and that sort of thing, but in terms of knowledge or intellect, that's the way we escape this bondage, which is the bondage of the flesh.

And yet, as Paul points out, all of that only led to ignorance and folly, the philosophers with all their wisdom were the greatest fools of all. Paul writes about that in First Corinthians, a congregation of Christians in a Greek city. And here's what he says. Where is the wise man, that is, what has he come to? Where's the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Hasn't God made the wisdom of this world foolish? For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

Jews demand miraculous signs and the Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God, for the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. You see, human ways of salvation lead either to ignorance, folly, weakness, or failure. The reason why Paul was not ashamed of the gospel is that it was God's way of salvation and was adequate in all of these areas.

The fourth reason is the one he emphasizes in the verse, that is because the gospel is powerful, the power of God, efficacious. It's very important that we understand exactly what he's saying here, because it's easy to misunderstand it. We can think, for example, that Paul is saying that the gospel tells us about God's power. A message is proclaimed, God is said to be powerful, and then those who hear the message are encouraged to go to God to get the power. Or else the gospel is thought of as containing power in the sense that we go to the gospel to get it. This isn't what Paul is saying, Paul is saying categorically that the gospel is the power of God, that is, the gospel itself is God's power. The proclamation of the gospel.

You see, Calvin, when he begins to write about this passage, is well aware of what's involved here, pointing out that it's not merely the gospel as a certain body of truth that's sitting over on the shelf somewhere as it were, but that it is actually the proclamation of the gospel, which God uses in such a powerful way. Calvin says by word of mouth, by word of mouth, in the proclamation of the gospel, that the power of God is seen. It means, you see, that as the gospel is preached day by day and Sunday by Sunday, across the world in one community or another, it is in that, in that preaching of the gospel, that God is at work to do the most important thing, that is to regenerate men and women. To make them alive where before they were spiritually dead, to turn them from their sin and turn them to righteousness so that they become followers of Jesus Christ. Nothing in the whole world is more important than that, nothing in the whole world is more powerful.

Paul says, in those verses I read from First Corinthians, that from a human point of view, preaching is foolishness, he speaks of the foolishness of preaching. I think by the very fact that Paul used that phrase, he lets us into how he must have felt on occasion, as he stood in a synagogue before wise rabbis, or in the marketplace before the Greek philosophers, and began to expound a message which in the eyes of the Greek philosophers is utter folly. When he did that in Athens, they laughed at him, you know. He spoke of a God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ in these latter days, and a God who would judge the world and that he had given proof of that and that he raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and when he spoke of the resurrection, they all began to laugh, they said, is anything more foolish than that? That God should actually reveal himself in a human being, that was just anathema to Greek ways of thinking, and to do that in a far off area of the Roman world, in that kingdom of the Jews and to do it in a man who was crucified and killed as a criminal, and then in addition to all of that folly, to suggest that God in some marvelous way raised that individual from the dead, why that's foolishness, that's utter folly.

Paul must have known what it was to be ridiculed and how foolish from a human point of view the preaching of the gospel seemed. And yet that's what God blesses. And this is the way God brings men and women to himself, this is the way God does what needs to be done.

And that leads me to my next point, the fifth reason why Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, it's because this good news of salvation is for everyone. He says, everyone who believes. And then he says, first for the Jew, then the Gentile. Some people have looked at that phrase, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile, and have imagined that it's saying to the Jew primarily or to the Jew because the Jew is more important. Of course that's not what Paul is saying, he's speaking chronologically. In exactly the same way that the Lord Jesus Christ was speaking chronologically when he said to the woman of Samaria, salvation is from the Jews. All he meant to say is that in the unfolding of the plan of salvation, God began with Israel. So the way of salvation was known there. There were real blessings as a result of that, the Jews, as he says in the ninth chapter, had the promises and the covenant and the law, and it was from them, as according to the flesh, that Jesus Christ came.

But he doesn't say that in order to say the Jews are more important, he's simply saying that the gospel is for Gentiles as well as Jews, and for Jews as well as Gentiles. The gospel is for everybody. How wonderful, can you think of any other message, certainly not many other messages that are genuinely universal in that sense? We can think of lots of messages that are good news. We can imagine that the stock market has improved, and so we can go and say, this particular stock has gone up 10 or 20 points, that's good news, but it's only good news if you own the stock. If you don't own the stock, it doesn't make any difference. And if you happen to own another stock that actually went down, it's kind of bad news to hear that the first stock went up. Or we can come to a family as a doctor would in the maternity ward and say, you have a son or you have a daughter, that's good news. But it's good news to the family, it's not general, universal good news necessarily.

And yet here you see is a gospel of salvation through the power of God, which is for the whole world. And so we take it to the whole world, that's our responsibility. And we proclaim it to the rich as well as to the poor, to the wise as well as to the unwise, to the Jew as well as to the Gentile, and to all other nations besides.

That's certainly a great emphasis in scripture. I think of John 3:16, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. Or I think of Peter's sermon at Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2 and verse 21, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Or I think of those verses that almost end the Bible from the last chapter of Revelation, Revelation 22:17, the Spirit and the bride say, come, and let him who hears say, come, whoever is thirsty, let him come, and whoever wishes, let him take of the free gift of the water of life. How can anyone be ashamed of a gospel?