God's Plan for salvation
Romans 4: 13-end
Imagine you are a church leader planning a visit to St Barnabas in Swanland. What would you write to them? What ground work do you want to do?
Is everything OK, or are there some things that need sorting out?
What are they getting wrong? You wouldn’t want to make them feel miserable or failures so they give up; you want to encourage them.
What do you think they need to know?
This was the position the Apostle Paul was in. It’s about AD57, so around 25 years after Jesus. After the events of Pentecost, the early church was growing in different regions and had spread to Rome.
The book of Romans in our Bibles is actually a letter from Paul, written to the church in Rome - probably meeting together in 5 house church. Although it actually reads more like the sort of essay written at theological college. It’s quite dense, and the commentaries that help to understand it are much, much thicker than the book itself!
It was written to Christians, mainly Gentiles (i.e. those who had not been Jews before becoming Christians), but would have included a few Jews who had become Christians.
It suggests some tension between these groups, with the Jewish believers wanting to hold on to dietary laws and sacred days and finding themselves rejected by the larger gentile group. ,
What is the message of Romans?
That God had a plan to rescue everyone, Jews and Gentiles. Paul’s letter to the Romans tells the Good News; the Gospel. Most of the letter maps out God’s big plan to rescue people. How God is righteous, and how He has reconciled His people back to Himself through faith. In short, ‘how salvation works’.
He sets out by saying that God is righteous, but people are not... all people, Jews and Gentiles, need salvation. They have ‘sinned’, i.e. fallen short of God’s standards, broken His laws, not loved Him, not loved others and are separated from God. Everyone needs rescuing from this, saving from this sin, and its consequences.
God achieved this through Jesus’ death; this needed to be accepted through faith, i.e. confidently trusting in God, in what He has done, and in His promises.
This is the way God has always dealt with people – he uses Abraham from the Old Testament as an example.
This is only the beginning. By freeing people from sin and its consequence – death – through what Jesus has done, there is new life from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is for Jews and Gentiles. Paul ends by talking about working out his new life in practical ways, both in the church and in the world.
Our reading this week goes back to the example of this that Paul used of how God makes people righteous or morally right before God. Paul chose the person of Abraham as his illustration:
Abraham had lived two thousand years earlier. He was promised land and that he would have a family that would be a blessing to the whole earth. This seemed unlikely; he was old, and so was his wife, Sarah.
I found it quite hard to summarise this passage that explains this; but I found it had already been done – The Message paraphrase of the Bible is not a literal translation of Greek to English, but puts what it says in simpler language – certainly better than I could, so I want to read this to you:
13-15 That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God’s promise at that—you can’t break it.
16 This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s reading the story backward. He is our faith father.
17-18 We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”? Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!”
19-25 Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, “It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up. He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That’s why it is said, “Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right.” But it’s not just Abraham; it’s also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.
Romans 4: 13-25 (The Message)
So, returning to the question at the beginning… the church leader planning a visit to St Barnabas in Swanland would say
This is the same plan for all of us. This was for everyone, Jew and non-Jew (known as Gentiles) – Jesus has set us right with God. We accept this by faith, by believing and trusting in it.
There is no difference depending on our backgrounds: Male/female, Old/young, rich/poor, those who prefer traditional worship patterns / those who find contemporary patterns more helpful.
It is one plan. For one church.”
Revd Kevin