How Does the Gospel Save Believers
Romans 1:16-17 How Does the Gospel Save Believers?
Part One Sun 7/11/04
Romans 1:16-17 (ESV) For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith."
Verse 16 says that "the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes." I have argued that what this means is not that the gospel is God's power to convert people to faith (although that is indeed true!), but that Paul means the gospel is God's power to bring those who keep on believing to everlasting safety and joy in the presence of God.
Our Ultimate Problem: The Wrath of God
One of the things I did not make plain in that message was why we need salvation. Salvation from what? What's the problem? The answer in the book of Romans is resoundingly this: We need to be saved from the wrath of God. Look at Romans 1:18, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. This is given as the reason why we need saving. God is very angry at our unrighteousness and the way we suppress and distort the truth to justify ourselves.
Or look in the next chapter, Romans 2:8, to see another glimpse of this. Paul says that Romans 2:8 but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. (notice those two words again, as in 1:18 – "truth" rejected and "unrighteousness" embraced), [God will render] wrath and indignation." This is our problem. God is indignant and wrathful toward us in our unrighteousness and our untruthfulness.
Or back up just three verses to Romans 2:5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. God's wrath is a righteous judgment. When we are unrighteous, God's righteousness blazes out with wrath and indignation. He is not to be trifled with.
This is what we need saving from in the end. This is our ultimate problem: God's final wrath that separates us from Himself and casts us into hell. If you ask the book of Romans, what do we need to be saved from, the answer comes back – from sin; and, from guilt; and from disunity and bad relationships; and from destructive habits and harmful ways; but mainly the answer is: We need to be saved from God's wrath. Our ultimate problem, though very few in the 20th century saw the problem, and it’s not looking much better in the 21st, in this age of prosperity theology is that as the great puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards said we are sinners in the hands of an infinite, omnipotent, all powerful, angry God.
The other reason I begin by mentioning what Paul does not say is to stress that Paul must want Christians to understand how they will be saved from the wrath of God. He must want us to know more than just that God loves us and sent Jesus to die for us. Think about this! It is so simple and so plain. Evidently it matters to Christ and to his inspired apostle, Paul, that Christians learn how the gospel is the power of God for salvation. Because he tells us how – in verse 17, and then for sixteen chapters he continues to tell us how!
A Strong Understanding of the Gospel
Why do I stress this? I stress it because it is simply unbiblical that so many Christians today have such a weak grasp – a weak understanding – of what our human condition is without grace, how God planned our redemption, what God did in Christ to save us, how the Holy Spirit worked in us to convert us, and how God goes on working (by the gospel!) to keep us and purify us and fit us for heaven. These are the things that the New Testament (especially Romans) is at pains to teach Christians, and it is stunning how many Christians simply do not care to know these things and therefore do not know them.
So I am stressing that in verse 17, instead of saying, "God saved us by his love and that's all you need to know," Paul begins to explain for us how the gospel saves believers. He does not just say, "It shows the love of God." Paul gets inside the love of God and shows how God deals with the real problems of the universe. We begin to learn what the real issues of the universe are. And they are deeper than we think they are – not the issues of abortion and same sex marriage in America, or the war in Iraq, - but far deeper than that….. Specifically, That there is a hostility against God and a suppression of truth and a deep unrighteousness of soul and the almighty wrath of God behind such things that only one power in the universe can overcome –and that is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Now, starting at verse 17 Paul moves inside the love of God and inside the gospel to show us how the gospel is that kind of power. And he writes this way because we Christians need to know these things. I'm not asking you to take a course in theology. I'm asking you to read and care about the inspired word of God in Romans 1:17. Christ sent his apostle to teach us how the gospel saves believers and brings them safely home to heaven.
This is what you are going to want to know when the doctor says; "We've done all we can do." And you say, "How long do I have?" And he says, "A week? Maybe two" – and then you are face to face with the Maker and Judge of the entire universe, infinite in holiness and unswerving in justice. My beloved Faith Temple, this is what you are going to want to know. How can I persuade you and win you to care about the most important things in the world?
The Comfort and Privilege of Understanding How God Works
I plead with you to get serious about growing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:10) and how he saves the unrighteous. If God inspired Paul to tell us, we ought to want to know. And what a privilege to know! And a comfort to know! What a joy to know! This series on Romans is a golden opportunity – a precious window of time. We are moving slowly so that you can think and study and read and discuss and review and check things out and pray over what you hear. This series has the potential of taking you deep into the heart and mind of God – if you want to go there. I plead with you: Do not be passive, don't coast. Make the thought of this letter the thought of your mind. Build your whole way of thinking and feeling out of the building blocks in this great letter.
So this morning, would you ask with me these questions:
How does the gospel save believers?
How does the gospel powerfully bring us to eternal safety and joy in the presence of God when what we really deserve is God's wrath, which verse 18 says is already being revealed from heaven?
How will the gospel triumph in whatever amount of time is left of your life to rescue you from despair and terror, and bring you home to God?
The answer of verse 17 is this: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes because "in it [that is, in the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith."
Now here is the puzzle. How can this be good news when the righteousness of God is our problem? The fact that God is righteous and I am unrighteous is the problem. His wrath is being revealed against the unrighteousness of man, as verse 18 says.
Martin Luther said he hated Romans 1:17 before he figured this out. He wrote,
I had . . . been captivated with an extraordinary ardor ( which is a fierce intensity of feelings) for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But . . . a single word in Chapter 1 [verse 17], 'In it the righteousness of God is revealed,' stood in my way. For I hated that word 'righteousness of God,' which . . . I had been taught to understand . . . is the righteousness [with which God] punishes the unrighteous sinner.
God Gives to Us What He Demands from Us
So how is this good news – that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel?
Here's the answer: God demands righteousness and we don't have it, so the only hope for us is that God Himself would give the righteousness that he demands.
That would be good news. That would be gospel. And that is what he does. What is revealed in the gospel is the righteousness of God for us that he demands from us. The reason the gospel is the power of God for salvation – the way that the gospel saves believers is that in it God reveals a righteousness for us that God demands from us. What we had to have, but could not create or supply or perform, God gives us freely, specifically, his own righteousness, the righteousness of God.
This is how the gospel saves us from the wrath of God. You see in verse 18 that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." So what is our rescue? What is our hope to escape this wrath when we are ungodly and unrighteous? The answer is that God would intervene and supply us with a righteousness that is not our own. That he would give to us the righteousness he demands from us. If God would do that, then his wrath would be averted and we could be reconciled to him. And that is, in fact, what he did. And that friends is the gospel. That is the way it saves us.
"The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes," because in it God offers to us what he demands from us, specifically, his own righteousness. He reveals as a gift in Christ Jesus what was once only a demand. This is how he saves: in the gospel of Jesus' death and resurrection God gives to us the righteousness that he demands from us. And I say thank you Jesus.
Now there is two more Sunday's worth of good news in this verse. Next Sunday we need to ask,
What is this gift of God's righteousness?
1) Is it the vindication of his own justice in the punishment of our substitute, Jesus?
2) Or is it our right standing with God as forgiven and acquitted sinners without guilt in his presence?
3) Or is it the moral transformation in us that actually changes our nature into obedient, righteous children of God? Or is it all three?
And the Sunday after that, we must ask how faith figures into this saving revelation of the righteousness of God. What does the phrase "from faith to faith" (verse 17) mean? And how does the quote there from Habakkuk 2:4 help us embrace all this great truth by faith?
But to close today I want to go back to Martin Luther. Maybe God will use his testimony to bring some of us from mere hearers this morning to those who love and live on this gospel reality of God's gift of righteousness. You remember he said he hated Romans 1:17. But he goes on explaining his struggle with his own guilt and fear before the righteousness of God.
Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at [Romans 1:17], most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, "In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'" There I began to understand [that] the righteousness of God is . . . righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith. . . . Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. (Martin Luther: Selections, pp. 11-12)
How I pray that many of us will find this verse a pathway into paradise.