The Letter to a Church He Had Never Seen

The next letter went to a church he had never seen. There were believers in Rome before Paul ever set foot in the city; somebody had carried the news up the roads, and it had taken root in the biggest city in the world. He had meant to go for years, and something stopped him every time. So he sent the longest letter he ever wrote up the road ahead of himself.

It went in the hands of a woman named Phoebe, who served the gathering at Cenchreae, the harbor town by Corinth. At the end of the letter he asked them to take her in properly and to stand by her in whatever she needed, because she had stood by many, and by him. So all of it was read out loud in a room in Rome, to people who had never met the man who wrote it, with the woman who carried it standing there.

It starts the way his letters start. “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the good news of God — to all those in Rome who are loved by God. Favor to you, and peace.” Then the thank-you: he thanks God for them, because the news that they trust him is being told in the whole world. Then he says why he wants to come. “I long to see you, so that I may share something of the Spirit with you and make you strong — that is, so that we may be encouraged together, by each other’s trust, both yours and mine.”

He says he owes them — not a favor he is planning to do, a debt he already has. “I am a debtor to Greeks and to foreign-speaking people, to the wise and to the unthinking.” And then, writing to the capital of the world: “I am not ashamed of the good news.”

Then he says something that nobody enjoys hearing. Everybody has done wrong. He starts with the people who never had the law of Moses. What can be known about God is plain, he says, because God made it plain. Ever since the world was made, his power that never runs out, and that he is God, have been there to be understood in the things he made. Nobody has an excuse. But they did not thank him, or treat him as God. Their thinking went empty and their hearts went dark, and, saying they were wise, they turned into fools, and traded the shine of the God who cannot die for pictures of things that die — birds, animals, creeping things.

So God let them go and have what they wanted, and their own bodies were dishonored among them. Women turned from the natural use of their bodies to what is against nature, and men left the natural use of the woman and burned in their wanting for one another, and got back in themselves the payment their going astray required. And because they did not think God worth knowing, he let them go to a mind that is no good for anything, and their lives filled up with what such a mind does. Paul makes a long list: greed, spite, envy, murder, fighting, lying, whispering behind backs, bragging, inventing new evils, disobeying parents, no natural affection, no mercy. They know the rule of God. They do these things anyway. And they clap for the people who do them too.

Then he turns on the man sitting there judging them. Whoever you are, he says, you have no excuse either, because you do the same things. “Or do you look down on the riches of his kindness and his patience,” he asks, “not knowing that God’s kindness is leading you to change your mind?” God’s kindness is not money to be spent. It is a hand on the shoulder turning you round. God gives back to each person according to what he did, and there is no favoritism with God — trouble for whoever works evil, honor and peace for whoever works good, Jew and Greek the same.

And having the law is no help by itself. It is not the ones who hear the law who come out right before God; it is the ones who do it. People who never had the law and who do by nature the things it says show that its work is written on their hearts. Then he speaks straight to the man who is proud of the law. You teach somebody else — do you teach yourself? You say do not steal: do you steal? You hate idols: do you rob temples? A real Jew is not the one you can see from outside; the cut that counts is on the heart.

Is there any good, then, in being a Jew? Much, in every way: they were the ones trusted with the words of God. But nobody stands outside the trouble. And he strings lines from the old writings together: “There is no righteous one, not even one; there is no one who is looking for God. Everyone has turned aside. Their throat is an open grave. Their feet are quick to shed blood. And they have not known the way of peace.” Every mouth shut. The whole world with nothing to say for itself.

And then, with everyone quiet, he writes: “All have sinned, and fall short of the shine of God — and they are set right freely, as a gift, by his favor, through the ransoming that is in Christ Jesus.” Freely. As a gift. Paul knows what that does to a man proud of his record. “Where is the boasting, then? It has been shut out.” Is God the God of Jews alone? Of the nations too, since there is only one God.

To show it he goes a long way back, to Abraham. The Scripture does not say Abraham earned anything. It says Abraham trusted God, and it was counted to him as being right. And it happened before there was any law to keep, and before he was circumcised. When a man works, his pay is not a gift but a debt owed him; Abraham was given what he had not worked for. He was nearly a hundred. He looked at his own worn-out body, and at Sarah, long past the age of having children, and did not go weak about it. Hoping when there was nothing to hope on, he trusted, sure that whatever God promised, God could do.

So then, being set right by trusting, we have peace toward God — and we can even be glad about our troubles, because trouble works endurance, and endurance makes something proved and solid, and that makes hope. Hope does not leave you ashamed, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Hardly anybody dies for a man who is merely in the right, he says. But God shows his own love this way: while we were still sinners, at the right time, Christ died for us.

Here he puts two men side by side — Adam, through whom wrong got into the world, and death after it, and Christ, through whom the gift came. And the gift is bigger than the damage.

Somebody was sure to twist that. If wrongdoing makes room for more favor, why not do more wrong? “May it never be!” he writes. “We died to sin. How shall we go on living in it?” Everyone immersed into Christ Jesus was immersed into his death, he says, and buried with him, so that just as Christ was raised, we would walk about in a new kind of life. “So count yourselves dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Do not let sin be king in your body and order you about. Stop handing your arms and legs over to wrong, to be used as weapons. Hand yourselves over to God, as people alive from the dead — and hand your arms and legs to God, to be weapons of what is right.” He says it again, because it is the thing he most wants them to do: “Just as you handed your arms and legs over as slaves to filth, hand them over now as slaves of right living.” “For the pay of sin is death,” he writes, “but God’s gift of favor is life for good, in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And then he says an honest thing about himself. “For what I carry out, I do not understand. It is not what I want that I do; it is the thing I hate, that is what I do.” “The good that I want, I do not do. The evil that I do not want — that is what I keep on doing.” Deep inside he is glad of the law of God. But he sees another law working in his arms and legs, at war with the law of his mind, taking him prisoner. Then he stops arguing and calls out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me out of this body of death?” “Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

There is no condemnation now, he says, for those in Christ Jesus. And what they were given is not a spirit of slavery to make them afraid again; it is the spirit of a child brought into the family, in which we call out, “Abba, Father” — the word a small child used for his own father. The Spirit himself says it along with our spirit: we are God’s children. And if children, then heirs, with a share in everything the Son has, if we go through the hard part with him too. And there is one thing in the middle of it that they have to do: “If you live the flesh’s way you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the things the body does, you will live.”

What we are going through now is not worth setting beside what is coming, he says. And it is not only us waiting. The whole creation is standing on tiptoe with its neck out; it was put under a uselessness it never chose, and it is groaning, in labor pains, right up to this minute — and we groan too, waiting for our bodies to be free. “For in hope we were saved. But hope that you can see is not hope. Who hopes for the thing he is already looking at?” And when we do not know what to pray for, the Spirit takes hold of the other end of the load with us and speaks for us with groans that have no words in them. We know that for those who love God everything works together toward good, for the ones called according to his purpose; and those he called he set right, and those he set right he gave his own shine to.

Then comes the end of it. “What shall we say to all this? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all — so how will he not, along with him, freely give us everything?” “Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? God is the one who sets right. Who is the one who condemns? Christ is the one who died — no, rather, who was raised — who is at God’s right hand, and who speaks up for us.” “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Trouble? Hard pressing? Being hunted? Hunger, or having nothing to wear, or danger, or the sword? As it is written: because of you we are being killed all day long; we are counted as sheep for the butcher.” “But in all these things we more than win, through the one who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor messengers nor rulers, nor things here now nor things coming, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in the whole of what God made, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

After that he writes about his own people. Most of the Jews Paul knew had not taken to Jesus, and it hurt him: he says he has a grief that never lets up, and could almost wish himself cut off from Christ if it would help his own family. He argues it out at length — that not everyone born into Israel was ever the whole of Israel, and that God is free to have mercy on whoever he chooses. Then he stops and says plainly how a person comes in. “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will go up into heaven?’ The word is near you — in your mouth, and in your heart. If you say out loud with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and trust in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be rescued.” Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be rescued, he says, Jew and Greek the same — but how is anybody to call on someone he has never heard of, and how is he to hear unless somebody tells him? Then he gives a picture instead of an argument: an olive tree with branches broken off and a wild branch grafted in, and he talks to the wild branch. “Do not boast over the branches that were broken off. If you do boast — remember you are not holding the root up. The root is holding you up. Do not be high-minded. Fear. And look at both sides of God: his kindness, and how hard he can be. Hard on the ones who fell — and kind to you, if you stay in his kindness. If you do not, you will be cut off yourself.” God has not pushed his people away, he says; God shut them all up together in disobedience so that he could have mercy on all of them. Then he stops arguing: “Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How impossible to search out his judgments, how impossible to follow his tracks!”

That was the first half of what he had to say.