Romans is one of the easiest books to place in the chronology of the New Testament.  Paul wrote it during the three months of Acts 20:3, which happened sometime between 55 and 56 AD.  We can locate it so precisely because of Paul’s autobiographical commentary in Romans 15:22-32.  He has finished collecting the contribution for the needy saints in Macedonia and Greece, and he is about to take it to Jerusalem.

However, there is more than a touch of pathos to Paul’s description of his plans after that.  He hopes to leave Jerusalem, travel to Rome, meet the Roman brethren for the first time, and ultimately embark on the first-ever preaching tour of Spain.  Throughout his ministry, he prefers to go where others haven’t.

To say the least, things don’t go according to plan.  While in Jerusalem, he is nearly lynched by a mob in the temple.  He is arrested by the Romans as a troublemaker and is spirited out of Jerusalem before a band of Jewish assassins can kill him.  He appears before the Roman governor and is imprisoned for the next two years without a trial. 

Another Roman governor appears.  When Paul is brought before him, the apostle is forced to appeal to the emperor to keep from being remanded into the custody of the Jewish chief priests, who certainly will execute him.  He is put on a ship to Rome, shipwrecked, and rescued.  Eventually, he arrives at his destination, years after he had intended to come and a prisoner to boot.  So far as we know, Paul never made it to Spain.

At first glance, these events appear to be much more the work of Satan than the work of God.  However, we also must reckon with the other things that happened while he was enduring frustration, misery, and danger.  For one thing, the prophecy of Acts 9:15 is fulfilled.  Paul proclaims the gospel to the Jewish high council, two Roman proconsuls, and the puppet king Agrippa.  Throughout his trials, he glorifies Christ.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Paul’s travails, though, is an indirect one.  Among his companions on the journey to Jerusalem is the physician Luke, who joins him at Philippi.  Luke goes with him to Jerusalem, then, two years later, from Jerusalem to Rome. 

The Scriptures do not say what Luke did during those two years, but we can make some inferences.  In Luke 1:1-4, Luke claims to have constructed his account after hearing from eyewitnesses and closely investigating things for himself.  He was a Gentile from the Aegean, and so far as we know, the only time in his life that he would have been around people like the Twelve was during Paul’s imprisonment.  It may well be that without that imprisonment, the foremost historian of our faith would not have been able to do his work.

Today, our plans often don’t go according to plan.  When we face trial and suffering, we often wonder what God is doing with us, especially when we are prevented from serving Him in the way we wanted to.  At such times, we should remember Paul.  God’s plans for us are better than our plans for ourselves, and it may be that the most important thing about our suffering is the impact it has on someone else.  We don’t know, any more than Paul did.  All we can do is trust.

In Romans 9-11, Paul is concerned with what I like to call the problem of Israel.  If salvation through Jesus is the triumphant conclusion of God’s plan for His people, how come the earthly nation of Israel, which had been God’s people for 1500 years, largely rejected it? 

One of Paul’s answers to this conundrum appears in Romans 10:1-5.  There, Paul notes that the failure of Israel to accept Christ is not as complete as it might seem.  In the time of Ahab, the prophet Elijah thought he was alone, but there were 7000 others who were faithful to God.  So too, Paul observes that there is a righteous remnant of Jews who did believe the gospel.

Though Paul doesn’t expand on his point, the righteous remnant is a theme throughout the Bible.  Starting from the time when God first chooses a people to be His own, they show a dismaying fondness for apostasy.  Eventually, God is forced to judge them, a tiny, faithful minority survives the judgment, they grow and prosper and become strong, and the cycle repeats itself.

This pattern begins even before the Israelites enter the land.  600,000 men saw God reveal Himself in fire at the top of Sinai and pledged themselves to Him.  Of those thousands, only two remained faithful and crossed the Jordan into Canaan.

Once they are in the land, the problems continue.  By the end of the time of the judges, Israel has been overrun by the Philistines and God’s dwelling place at Shiloh has been destroyed.  The Israelites really don’t recover until the kingship of David.

The era of the divided kingdom sees more of the same.  Though the house of Ahab and the worshipers of Baal seem so powerful in the time of Elijah, they are destroyed by Hazael, Elisha, and Jehu.  Only the righteous remnant (comprising people like the Rechabites) endures.  According to 2 Chronicles 30:11, another righteous remnant from the northern tribes comes humbly to worship in Jerusalem at the time of the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians.

The Assyrians are an instrument of judgment against the kingdom of Judah too.  The remnant of Isaiah 10:20-21 is contextually a remnant that returns from Assyrian oppression, and it is made up of both Israelites and Judahites.  As the Jeremiah 24 prophecy of good figs and bad figs makes clear, the same pattern holds during the Babylonian invasion and captivity.

There is a powerful lesson here for us.  We want the Lord’s church to be thriving and strong, and we are grieved when we see so many brethren abandon the ancient pattern for the wisdom of the age.  However, there never has been a time when God’s people were thriving and strong yet remained faithful.  The divisions that have taken place since the Restoration only confirm the rule.  Sadly, whenever the righteous prosper, they start trusting in themselves and cease to be righteous.

We should not yearn to belong to those who have got it all figured out and succeed through their own wisdom and strength.  We should yearn instead to belong to the remnant, those who cling to God and are roundly mocked for doing so, always failing, always dwindling, always defeated. 

Strangely enough, though it always looks like the remnant is about to be destroyed, it never is.  Against the odds, God’s people endured through disaster in the wilderness, captivity in Babylon, and persecution across the Mediterranean.  Indeed, they triumphed.  No matter how bad things look, if we endure, we will triumph too, not because the remnant is so powerful, but because He is. 

If there is any passage in the Bible that Calvinists love, it is Romans 9:6-24.  Upon a casual reading it seems to confirm the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.  It talks at great length about God’s mercy and God’s choice being the deciding factors in human existence, and in the context, Paul cites a number of Old-Testament figures to prove his point.  When first I began to study the Bible on my own, this context intimidated me.

However, as is often the case, when we consider this text in a wider context, it takes on a different meaning.  Paul’s goal in Romans 9-11 is not to explain the salvation or damnation of individuals; it is to explain why the physical nation of Israel, despite having received God’s promises, largely has rejected Jesus and His salvation.  Romans 10:6 implies the question Paul is answering:  has the word of God failed?

In response, Paul argues that the promises to the patriarchs are not fulfilled through their fleshly descendants (the physical Israel) but through the children of the promise (Christians).  It always has been this way; according to the flesh, Ishmael and Esau should have been the heirs of the promise, but God chose Isaac and Jacob as heirs.

In this, Paul continues, God is not being unjust.  If He wants to show mercy to Christians instead of Israelites, He has the right to do that, and if He wants to use Israel as a tool to make known His glorified people from all races, He can do that too.

None of this has anything to do with the predestination or salvation of individuals.  Ishmael was not automatically lost because he was not the heir of the promise; in fact, we know nothing about his salvation or condemnation.  The same is true of Esau.  In many ways, he looks like a more righteous man than his younger brother.

The issue of Pharaoh is trickier.  As Paul’s quotation from Exodus 9:16 shows, God did indeed raise Pharaoh up so that He would be glorified through him.  However, at least for a time, Pharaoh had a choice about how God would be glorified.  Cyrus-like (compare Isaiah 45:1-6), Pharaoh could have let God’s people go immediately, which would have made the book of Exodus much shorter and less interesting.

However, that’s not the choice that Pharaoh made.  Though God did harden Pharaoh’s heart later (in much the same way that I might harden my wife’s heart by doing something that I know drives her buggo), the first time that Pharaoh’s hard heart is attributed to anybody, it’s attributed to Pharaoh, in Exodus 8:15.  Now, God only could be glorified through Pharaoh’s humbling and destruction.

All of these Old-Testament characters are introduced, though, only to prove Paul’s main point.  God can do whatever He wants with the physical nation of Israel, and He can do whatever He wants with the spiritual nation of Christians.  Only the second nation will be saved, but as Paul’s own example proves, there was nothing hindering Jews from joining the spiritual Israel except for their own hardheartedness. 

The same holds true for us today.  We know which group will be saved.  Whether we belong to that group is up to us.

Most Christians are aware that when it comes to serving God, we need to take our cues from His word rather than from the world.  However, the dangers here are broader than we often realize.  It is not only conformity to the world that poses a problem.  A rejection of worldliness that is so emphatic that it pushes us to the other, equally ungodly, extreme is equally problematic.

Consider, for instance, the reaction of the Lord’s church to the denominational practice of clerical celibacy.  We correctly note that nothing in the Bible requires vows of chastity from religious leaders, and we correctly identify the many temptations and problems that such vows create.

However, in our zeal to oppose such error, we end up denying that singlehood can have spiritual value at all and exalting marriage as the truest way to live a godly life.  Married brethren may not be able to sense it, but any Christian who has been unmarried for a while will tell you that there is a caste system in the church that puts couples and families at the top with single Christians as second-class citizens. 

To detect signs of this caste system, we need look no further than the subjects of our sermons.  Marriage and family is probably the single most common subject for a gospel meeting.  How often do we hear of gospel meetings directed exclusively at the unmarried?

If the Scriptures supported this bias, that would be one thing, but instead, they have as much to say about the spiritual value of the unmarried as of the married.  Yes, the qualifications of elders and deacons involve marriage, but we also must reckon with Paul’s words about the usefulness of being unmarried in 1 Corinthians 7.  In vs. 32-35, he points out that unmarried Christians can devote themselves entirely to God, whereas married Christians are inevitably torn between pleasing God and pleasing their spouses.

Brethren commonly dismiss the implications of this discussion by saying that it relates only to “the present distress”, and it is true that some of what Paul says here in praise of singleness (especially vs. 29-31) is limited to a context of great upheaval.  However, vs. 32-35 is not context-specific.  I love my wife and family, and I would not surrender them for anything, yet I spend as much time and energy on pleasing my wife as godly husbands did 2000 years ago.  If I didn’t have a family, I could use all those resources in the Lord’s service instead.

Single Christians, then, are not second-class spiritual citizens.  Even if they do not currently experience many of the joys that married Christians know, they have been presented with unique opportunities to glorify their Master.  Rather than mourning what they do not have, they ought instead to rejoice in all that they can do.  Even the best marriage only will last a lifetime, but good works are an eternal memorial before God.  When single Christians give their time, talents, and money to Him, they are storing up a treasure for themselves that will last forever.

In our consideration of the original languages of the Bible, we’re fairly used to the idea that koiné Greek has elements that modern English doesn’t.  Most Christians have heard that there are four Greek words equivalent to the English “love”.   However, the opposite also is true.  There are things that modern English does that Greek doesn’t.

In particular, the Greek manuscripts of the Bible don’t use capitalization, along with punctuation and spaces between words.  However, we do use capitalization.  In a religious context, we use it to refer to deity.  God is our Creator, not our creator.  Jesus is Lord, not lord. 

This often makes a difference in comprehension.  If I say that my daughter has a generous spirit, readers understand that I am discussing her attitude and demeanor, not claiming that she is inhabited by a heavenly being.  However, when I say that the apostles were baptized with the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, I clearly am talking about the heavenly being.

In Greek, those cues are absent.  All the capitalized references to God in our Bibles were capitalized by the translators.  In this, they did not apply some sort of esoteric knowledge.  Rather, they considered the context and determined whether the word in context appeared to be talking about deity or not.

Sometimes, there is little question.  “Spirit” in 2 Corinthians 13:14 obviously is about the Godhead; “spirit” in 1 Corinthians 5:5 obviously is not.  However, there are many verses in which the correct choice is less obvious, and in those situations, our translations tend to employ the capital S.   

In my ever-so-humble opinion, all the capital S’s can introduce a level of mystical confusion into texts that would be straightforward if translated in lowercase.  Romans 8:1-11 is perhaps the most obvious example of this.  With capital S’s, throughout the context, Paul is paralleling a being (the Spirit) with a non-being (the flesh).  Additionally, he appears to be claiming that Christians are simultaneously indwelt by the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead.  Great is the mystery, indeed!

However, the mystery vanishes in lowercase.  Now, Paul is discussing the difference between those who walk according to the flesh (by following their fleshly impulses) and those who walk according to the spirit (by following their spiritual impulses).  So too, having the spirit of God, the spirit of Christ, and the spirit of Him who raised Christ from the dead doesn’t mean that we have a multitude of supernatural entities sharing our headspace.  Instead, it means that we share God’s motivations and perspectives. 

A little Greek is a dangerous thing, but so too is unquestioningly accepting translators’ decisions in areas where thoughtful Christians are competent to decide for themselves.  I may well be wrong about Romans 8.  Certainly, others are free to disagree with me!  However, all of us ought to be aware of the issue and address it thoughtfully, as befits those with a Berean spirit.