The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Is the gospel for everyone or is it merely a cultural thing? Believe it or not, many Christians don't know the answer to this fundamental question.

Guest (Male): 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 series in the Book of Romans, called The Power of Salvation. We'll be learning how the gospel applies to all of our lives and to the lives of others.

Guest (Male): So, do you find yourselves sometimes asking, is the gospel for everyone, or how does the gospel fit into my lifestyle? The Apostle Paul teaches us that what people really should be wondering is whether or not there is a God, and if God does exist, is he the God of Christianity? Let's turn now to Romans chapter 1, verse 14 and see what Paul meant by that as we learn about the whole gospel.

Dr. James Boice: The whole gospel is something we've been looking at, and we'll see again and again as we proceed in our study of the Book of Romans.

Even in the introduction which we have studied, we've found that Paul has been speaking about the gospel. It's a gospel that has been promised beforehand by God in the Old Testament scriptures. It's a gospel that centers in his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and it concerns his two natures. The fact that he's God on the one hand and fully man on the other. Concerns his death and resurrection. It's a marvelous, all-embracing, holistic gospel.

And Paul is going to go on talking about it throughout the entire Book of Romans. In fact, the Book of Romans is the greatest exposition of the whole gospel in all the Bible. But now, in verses 14 and 15, he indicates that this full-orbed gospel is for everybody. Here's the way he puts it from the perspective of his own experience. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.

Now, it's always been the case, of course, that the gospel is for everybody, though we often forget it. Tom Hopler, in his excellent book on cross-cultural evangelism, A World of Difference, surveys the biblical material from this perspective and points out that as early as the Book of Genesis, we find the gospel being proclaimed to everybody.

The earliest mention of the gospel is in Genesis 3, verse 15, in the context of God's judgment upon the serpent, the woman, and Adam. And in that context, God promises the savior to, as Hopler points out, both the male and the female, that is, both to Adam and to Eve. He studies Daniel for example.

And in Daniel we find that the announcement of the rule of God and the salvation to come through the Jewish Messiah is for the oppressive and hated Babylonians as much as it is for the persecuted Jews. You come to the ministry of Christ and you find him associating with the outcast of his society, among what were called in that day the publicans and sinners. You find that his friends were the carpenters and the tax collectors and sometimes the prostitutes.

And it didn't mean that he wasn't able also to proclaim the gospel to those of noble birth. When Nicodemus came to him, he spoke to Nicodemus. But in Christ's own ministry, it's quite evident that the gospel transcended those cultural or sociological lines. It took a while for the early preachers of the gospel to understand this. Peter, among the others, had his prejudices.

God had to send him a special vision to teach him that the gospel was also to go to Gentiles, to Cornelius in particular, this Roman military officer. And so God did teach Peter that. And after it was over, when Peter had come to Cornelius's house, he summed it up saying, I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism, but accepts men from every nation that fear him.

Or again, the Lord Jesus Christ taught this in terms of the Great Commission. He said, as Luke records it in the Book of Acts, you will receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, that is, to the Jews, but also in Judea and Samaria, that is, to the Samaritans, that they didn't think a great deal about. And finally, to the ends of the world.

So, the point is that the gospel is for everybody. And the reason I emphasize it is that we easily forget that fact. Oh, we know it. But as Christians, we often fall into patterns of thinking that the gospel is chiefly for people like ourselves, or at least we willingly ignore the fact that we have an obligation to bring it to people who are different.

Or from the perspective of those who are not yet Christians, sometimes the cultural edges of Christianity are used as an excuse, and unbelievers say, well, that Christianity is for people different than me, I'm just not that type of person. Now, I take you to Paul's text, where he says in the first instance that he felt an obligation to the Greeks.

Paul distinguishes the Greeks from the non-Greeks, and then in a second comparison in the same verse between the wise and the unwise. That second comparison indicates how we're to take the first. You see, Paul could have said, in writing to the Romans, I feel an obligation to preach the gospel to both Greeks and Romans. Now, if he had said that, he would have been thinking in terms of nationality, that is, the Greek state versus the Roman state.

Or he could have stopped his comparison after the word non-Greek. He could have said, I'm obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, and have left it at that. In that case, he would probably have been thinking ethnically. That is, people who were the beneficiaries of Greek culture versus those who had another culture. But he doesn't say that. He says Greeks and non-Greeks, comma, wise and unwise.

What that probably indicates is that when he's thinking of Greeks, he's thinking of Greeks in terms of their language and their education. You see, that's a very important point, because in the ancient world, most of the literature, the history, the drama, the epics, and the philosophy was in Greek. You have Herodotus and Thucydides, the first great historians of the West. You have the epics, the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer. You have all of the Greek drama, the many dramatists. And then above all, you have the philosophy, Plato and Socrates and all of the others who came down from them.

The Romans got most of their education by means of this channel, that is, through the Greek language, and in Roman culture, those who were the teachers most often were Greeks, sometimes slaves, but people who had the beneficial advantage of this background through their language. This is what Paul is thinking of here. So when Paul says that he is ready to preach the gospel to Greeks as well as to non-Greeks, he's saying in the first instance that the gospel is for the educated.

Now we need to make that point today, because many people in our culture are precisely that, educated. And the point is that if you are among the educated people of our day, the gospel most certainly is for you. It doesn't make any difference how wise you may be, how educated you may be, how much you may know, or how much you may not know.

The gospel is for you, because regardless of your education, you are responsible to your maker against whom you have sinned, and one day you must give an accounting before him. Now educated people have a set of excuses that they use to refuse to come to Jesus Christ. And we've heard many of them, perhaps you're making some of those excuses yourself.

You've been to university perhaps and you've taken courses in sociology and you speak out of that background to say, well, you know, I've been taught in my sociology courses that all religions are relative. They're just a product of cultural factors. You're a Christian because you happened to be born in the West and because you're the product of a stream of history that has flowed on from the Protestant Reformation. If you were born somewhere else in the world, or perhaps at a different time in the world, you might as well have been a Buddhist or a Muslim. And that is true, of course, in one sense.

But you see, it's not the point. The point is not what you and I might have been, had we been born in other circumstances. The point is, is there a God, and is the God who exists, if he does exist, the God represented by Christianity? You see, it's a matter of truth versus falsehood, not a matter of circumstance. Is Jesus Christ whom he claimed to be, and did Jesus Christ reveal the true God? That's the matter that has to be faced and it can't be dodged simply by sociological considerations.

Here's somebody else who will say, well, you know, I've taken an awful lot of science courses, and we live in a scientific modern age. And one thing we know in our age is that things like miracles are merely ancient superstitions. No intelligent person today, no educated person today, can believe in miracles. How could you believe in the person, a savior, who is half God and half man? How can you believe that an individual like that literally walked upon the water? How can you believe in resurrections? No intelligent person can believe that.

But the truth is that many intelligent people believe that, and they have always believed that. As a matter of fact, if you study past history, you'll find that some of the most intelligent people in all of world history have been Christians, and have maintained exactly that and that brilliant people today believe it, and they would maintain quite the contrary, that if a person in our time, even with all our scientific knowledge, categorically denies the supernatural, that person, rather than the believer, is the truly unintelligent one.

Other educated people have had the advantage of courses in biblical studies in university, sometimes in seminary, and they know enough about such studies to turn them against the Bible itself. They can talk about the difference between Pauline and Petrine theology, or the difference between First and Second Isaiah. Or they can talk about textual problems. They can point to cultural backgrounds to the formation of the New Testament.

They can say, well, after all, the Apostle Paul was just a male chauvinist and dismiss his teaching in that and other ways. Well, those critical theories that you sometimes hear in religion courses in universities have been answered by conservative, believing people. They've been answered well.

But the point is, you see, if you want to learn about Christianity, why is it that you try to learn about it and take your views from that kind of a course anyway? Isn't it possible that in doing that, that is simply another way of evading Christ's claims? If you want to learn about Christianity, isn't it better to learn about it from somebody who believes it, who understands it from the heart as well as with the mind? Wouldn't you do better off learning about Christianity from that believing pastor who tried to lead you to Christ when you were in high school? Or your believing mother, or grandmother, or grandfather, or aunt, whoever it may be, who has prayed for you all these many years.

You see, you can't say, I'm too intelligent, I don't need the gospel, because the Apostle Paul himself was among the most intelligent men who ever lived and he was certainly among the best educated. And when he went to preach to the educated people of his day in Athens, for example, the intellectual capital of the ancient world, he preached exactly the same gospel that he preached in the far-off provinces of the Roman Empire.

When he came to Athens, they treated him with polite amusement, the way educated people often do. They said, oh, he's come with a new religion, let's hear what he has to say. He's preaching foreign gods. And the Apostle Paul stood up to preach, not the least intimidated by their attitude, and he preached this way. He said, as I came through your city, I saw an altar to the unknown God. Now you don't know him, but I do. And I'm going to proclaim this unknown God to you.

He described him as the creator of all things and the one who sent his son Jesus Christ to be the savior. And he concluded by saying, he has appointed this Jesus Christ to be the one by whom he will judge the world. And then he called upon those intellectual, perhaps arrogant, people in Athens to repent of their sin and turn to Jesus.

You see, if you use your education as an excuse for failing to come to Christ, you're doing exactly that. And you need to repent of it and find real wisdom, true wisdom in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote to those in another Greek city on one occasion, saying that the gospel of the crucified son of God alone is true wisdom. This is what he wrote.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? It's a very good question. We have a great deal of worldly wisdom today. Does it not seem foolish when you look at the problems that continue to plague us in our time? 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 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.

Now, the second category of those to whom Paul writes and to whom he felt a special obligation are the non-Greeks, or as some of our more literal translations say, the barbarians. That word barbarian has a particularly negative tone in our language, it means someone who is uncultured, uncouth, barbaric as we say, but that wasn't quite the idea that the word had in Paul's time. It had to do chiefly with language.

The Greeks spoke Greek, of course, and everything else, every other language that they heard, just sounded to their ears like babbling. When they heard a group of people gathered around talking a language that wasn't Greek, it sounded like that. So they made up a word based on the sound, barbarian. And that's where the word came from, literally. It's a word that described what the other languages sound like. So a barbarian is one who doesn't speak Greek.

It doesn't mean that he's uncultured, many of the barbarians were cultured, but it is at least negative to this extent, if you didn't know Greek, you were cut off from Greek culture. You didn't have the ability to read the histories and the plays and the classics and the philosophy in that language. Now, I apply it in that way because in our culture today, there are many people who feel cut off, cut off for various reasons. Sometimes it's education, the thing I've been talking about.

I pointed out that the gospel is for the educated, the intelligentsia, but there are people who are not educated, often through no fault of their own. They just haven't had the opportunities. And they feel cut off because of that. Their friends, people they associate with, have been to college, they haven't. They know all of the things that people are talking about, they don't. They even know the buzzwords with which you get by, words like buzzwords, and interface, and existentialism. If it's any help, I don't know what interface means myself.

I think it's an atrocity, it's one of those misuses of words, but all the same, those are the words that people use, and people who haven't been to college and haven't had that particular form of education often feel cut off by that. And they say, well, the gospel, this business of Christianity, must be for the educated, it's not for me. Some people feel cut off because of race. They've had difficulties, prejudices because of their racial background, and others have made it, sometimes others in their own race, but they haven't. And everywhere they go, those who are different or those who have made it, look down on them and they know what that is to feel excluded in certain ways because of their background, where they come from.

Other people feel cut off because of their economic situation. Their income, they don't make lots of money, so they don't have a house in the popular neighborhood, they don't wear, they can't afford the right kind of clothes, they don't drive the big car. And they feel cut off because of that. And they look at the churches and they say, well, the churches are filled with all those people who have made it, but it's not for me. This matter of Christianity isn't for people from my background.

Now, if you feel that way, if you've experienced that, many more people have experienced that than you would think. I need to begin with an apology on behalf of the church, because the sort of thing you see really is true, it's happened. Christianity has been very effective in working with normal people, working people. And it has given them opportunities for education and advancement that they might not have had in other ways. It's actually broken sociological and cultural shackles. But then what has happened, and we've seen it in our time, is that it becomes kind of an upper-level exclusive type of religious club.

And those who have felt the benefits of Christianity are anxious, perhaps not even consciously, but to keep people who haven't had those benefits a little bit at arm's length. It's like people who have broken out of the inner city and live in a nicer neighborhood, really don't want to go back into the city, they want to keep that distance, they say they have paid their dues, they've put in their time. And people unfortunately, wrongly, sinfully, but nevertheless understandably do that in Christianity. So Christianity has sort of a cultural overlay to it in our time.

Well, that's wrong, it's something the church must repent of. The best days of the Christian church have always been when the church has been among the working common people. The great days of revival have always been that, and if you trace it back, that is what the Lord Jesus Christ himself did. He worked among the normal people, the working people, the laboring people. The church has done that, the church needs to repent. But I'm speaking, you see, to those who haven't had these benefits and have been cut off, and I say to you, even though that's true and the church needs to repent of it, don't let that keep you from Jesus Christ, don't let that keep you from Christianity.

The church needs you, but far more important than the fact that the church needs you, you need Jesus. Jesus died for you. Jesus is the savior of the world. He died for all types of people, all classes of people. And we find our true meaning, our true worth, our true destiny when we come to him.

There's the third class of people that's worth thinking of, and that is the class that Paul first mentions in verse 16. He doesn't mention.