THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD REVEALED

Romans 1

May 6, 2017

Make America Godly Again

@ Moody Park, Houston, TX

1:17:  The gospel of Christ is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.

Psalm 85:11:  Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.  The Lord shall give that which is good; and our land shall yield her increase.  Righteousness shall go before Him; and shall set us in the way of His steps.

God’s righteousness is both His moral holiness and His saving activity.  “Righteous” is part of the vocabulary of the covenant between God and His people. 

In Romans, “righteousness’ is God’s saving victory over sin, man’s enemy, as well as a moral attribute of God and man, and man’s acceptance by God.

At the Cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has acted in moral and saving righteousness.  He has offered to man the gift of the righteousness of acceptance with the intent that man may go on to live a life of moral righteousness.  (F.F. Bruce Bible Commentary – Leslie C. Allen).

Paul explains the doctrine of his gospel in terms of Hab. 2:4, unfolding its relevance for the new Christian era.  God by the death of Christ has set men right with Himself, if they will but put themselves by faith into His hands.  The faith-righteous man shares the life of the risen and exalted Christ now in part and hereafter fully.

The first seven verses of chapter one was Paul’s introduction. 

1:8-12:  “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.  For God is my witness, whom I serve with my Spirit in the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayer; Making request, if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come to you.  For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, to the end you may be established. That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.”

Not unlike the United States today, Rome was full of wickedness.  However, the Roman Christians were famous for their Faith.  Travelers would talk of them as they journeyed about the empire.  In time their faith was known in all the major cities of the Gentile world. 

  Seneca a philosopher and contemporary of Paul wrote, “Rome is full of crime and vice.  Vileness gains in every street.  Vice is no longer practiced secretly but in every street.  Innocence has not only become rare, it is extinct.  A monstrous contest of wickedness is going on…  He confirms Paul’s account of the awfulness of the heathen.”

  There is no way to live a dedicated life in the face of adversity without the power of the Gospel of Christ.

In personal relationship with Jesus Christ, we know and experience the intimacy of the Presence of the Lord. I believe Paul is saying, “I want to bring you some spiritual blessing that will strengthen you in the faith.  Or perhaps I should say, we will both be strengthened by each other; I by the influence of your faith upon me and you by mine.”   

The Spirit has steadily urged Paul in the direction of Rome.  In moving westward from Syrian Antioch (the beginning point of his missionary travels) Paul established one church after another.  But then he found he had to revisit them to deal with internal problems and fortify them against the persecution.  It kept him so busy grounding the churches of Asia and Greece that he had been hindered from pushing on to Rome. 

Now that is over, as he says in chapter 15, there is no further need for his ministry in Greece.   However, arrest, trial, two years’ languishing in prison and shipwreck were to intervene before his prayer was answered.  

Paul makes an interesting statement.  I considered it and said, “Lord such boldness of Faith”. “That I might have some fruit among you also.” 

His apostolic commission has endowed him with a sense of world-wide missionary obligation which transcends all types of civilization and degrees of culture.  Cosmopolitan Rome would be a mixing pot of all cultures and civilizations.  This is also true of Houston, Texas. 

Paul must have paused her and pondered Rome---with thoughts of grandeur, power, culture and pride of the ancient world.  The heathen of Rome considered themselves to be wise men, yet they despised the gospel as so much foolishness.   However, they didn’t hesitate to worship their own emperors as living deities. Paul says he is not ashamed of the Gospel.  It is a power that eclipses the achievements of Rome.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of salvation.  

It was the power of the Gospel and Paul’s commission to the Gentiles that causes him to expect a harvest.    

Christians some times sound like the Philosopher Seneca, we can philosophy about the problems of the world as he did.  However, Paul carried the dunamis power of the Gospel to bring changes even to Rome. 

In the O.T. with all of its miracles, is a history of power.  It is the power of God.  Those miracles displayed God’s power working for man.  When we come to the N.T., we again see power.  But this time it is God’s power working in the man, Jesus Christ and His Church—taking sinners and making them righteous. 

When men believed the message he brought, they were blasted out of their depravity and guilt and supernaturally lifted to the level of Christ!  They were placed “in Christ.”  Paul was keenly aware of the military power of Rome, but he knew that no power on earth could do for men what his gospel could do.

  Verse 16 is the grand theme of Paul’s letter –salvation.

I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God to salvation to every one that believes… 

The moment a sinner believes the gospel, he becomes the “righteousness of God” in Christ (2 Cor. 5:21).  In an act of faith, he opens his heart to Jesus and invites Him into his life.  The indwelling Lord breaks the grip of sin on the believer enabling him to live a Godly life and serve God.  At death he is released from the body to live in eternity with the Lord.  

John 8:51:  Verily, verily, I say to you, if a man keep My saying (gospel), he shall never see death. 

1:17-18:  “for therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, the just shall live by faith.  For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”

 Ps. 85:9: Surely his salvation is near them that fear Him; that glory may dwell in our land.

John 8:24: …If you do not believe that I am the Son of God, you shall die in your sins.

There is no way to receive righteousness except by believing the gospel it is acquired by Faith.  There is no salvation until we open our hearts to Jesus. 

Romans 1:18: The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.

John 3:36:  “He that believes on the son has everlasting life; and he that believes not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him”  

1:19-20:  Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shown it to them.  For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. 

Paul seemingly anticipates the question, “How can God be angry with people who have never heard of Him and know nothing about Him?   

That’s impossible, says the apostle.  There is no such person.  Everyone knows there is a God, for the Fact of God stands out clearly in the midst of His creation.  From the very beginning the creation itself has been a billboard shouting the fact that God is alive.  “The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork...” (Psa. 19:1)

God is easily discernible in creation and conscience.  Just as human character is revealed by the acts of a man, so are God’s existence and divinity seen in what He does.  The natural reveals the supernatural; the visible the invisible. 

Knowing the fact of God does not save a man.  If a man cries out to the Lord, he will hear him and save him.  He will reveal His way to Him by revelation.   

In primitive times, as today, men knew about God, but they didn’t want any part of Him.  The Spirit’s witness made them uncomfortable.  Because they liked sin better than walking with God, they turned down the “hearing aid” of the Spirit’s voice.  They shut their eyes to the testimony of God’s creation.  The heathen  are descendants of people who forgot God.  Because God has made the witness so plain, mankind of every age is wholly without excuse. 

1: 21-14:  “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.  Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” 

Paul is weighing the Hellenistic society of his day and finds it wanting.  Everywhere is chaos.  Animals have become gods, man has become woman, wrong has become right.  Nature without the true God has become unnatural.  The Creator has been rejected and creation is in chaos; for the apostle these two facts are cause and effect. 

In resisting the high moral standards of God, they quickly lost their appreciation for God. This led them to abandon the true knowledge of God and find a way to worship Him without having to put up with His Holiness.  But once the high knowledge of God was shunned, man went into spiritual darkness. 

These men began to search out the meaning of life through reason.  This is the basis of philosophy.  The man who tries to explain himself and the world without the light of God is a philosopher.  The word means, ‘lover of wisdom.”  The wisdom, of course, is man’s no God’s.

John 8:12: Jesus said, I am the light of the world; he that follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.  

This is what we see on our TV. screens night after night as the pundits of television philosophy about the condition of the world.  None will ever come to the right conclusion with out the light of God. 

The man, who rejects God, soon ends up doing the most stupid thing a man can do, worshipping something he has made with his own hands and calling it his god.  For someone who claims to be wise, to make an idol and then say it made him, is about as foolish as a man can get. 

Man is inherently religious.  Designed to worship the true God, he must now worship something even if he has to make it with his own hands. 

The rest of the chapter is made up of three parallel sections grouped around the phrase “God gave them over”--- because they did not glorify Him; their fate was the sexual degrading of their bodies. 

1:24-26:  “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves:  Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever Amen.  For this cause God gave them up to vile affections:  for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.” 

Humanity reaches the depths when its women become corrupt.  For God intends that the virtues of the race should be preserved in her.  But when she abandons herself to the lower nature, society is doomed.  When women fall from their high places, man becomes inflamed and abandons himself to unrestrained vileness.   

1:27-28:  “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.  And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.”

When a man turns his back on God, refusing to have God in his thoughts, God removes His witness from that man’s conscience.  Then the individual is abandoned to a life without restraint and his character degenerates as his evil nature takes over. 

John 8:24: If you do not believe that I am He, you shall die in your sins.  

1: 29-31:  “Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. 

God made them harvest the crops they themselves had sown.  Because they exchange the real God for false gods, by way of temporary punishment, they exchanged that which was natural for that which was unnatural.  The price they paid for rejecting God was to become moral rejects. 

This is the climax of sin.  To assent coldly and objectively to others’ sins is worse than to succumb to temptation oneself in the heat of the moment.

All such must expect sentence of death at the judgment day.

John 8:51 Verily, verily, I say to you, if a man keep My saying, he shall never see death.

Preached by:  Carolyn Sissom

Scripture from K.J.V. I entered into the labors of F.F. Bruce Bible Commentary, Leslie C. Allen, C.S. Lovett’s Lights on Romans, comments and conclusions are my own.

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