10.25.20 Romans 1:16–17
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes—to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed by faith, for faith, just as it is written, “The righteous will live by faith.”
The Unexpected Gospel is Nothing to be Ashamed Of
When I was in college or seminary I went with my parents to visit with my old pastor who had retired. He was an old school type of preacher with a very deep voice. I think he stood about 6’4” with white hair and a very commanding presence. In truth, he was scary. What struck me upon our visit, however, was how kind and jovial he was to talk to. He told me a funny old story about when he was at the seminary. I had never seen that side of him. It surprised me.
Sometimes the same thing happens with people’s expectations from God. The Apostle Paul was sure that Jesus was an imposter who had deceived many people. He was on the way to Damascus to arrest the followers of Jesus, when he was suddenly confronted with a different Jesus than he expected. Jesus was alive and well. This was a powerful and scary thing for Paul. This vision of God changed his entire perspective of who God is and his whole system of salvation.
The same thing happened to Martin Luther. The Latin way of translating the righteousness of God is “iustitia Dei.” You could translate that as the justice of God. It drew for him a picture of God who gives you what you deserve. He is just. If God demands it, He demands it. If God threatens it, He makes good on His threat. There’s no getting around it. When he had heard the term, “righteousness of God,” he thought that it basically meant that God is fair. He gives people what they deserve, what they have coming to them. There was no bending Him or getting around His demands. You’re going to have to pay. Luther took God’s threats seriously and he honestly tried to do everything the Catholic Church told him to do, so he never felt righteous. He actually said he hated God for being God. But God had another vision of Himself that He wanted to show Luther.
Some say that children see God through their parents. God calls Himself “our Father.” But if your Father is mean and dictatorial, that is the picture you will get of God. If your parents are indifferent towards God and show no respect towards Him or desire for forgiveness, then you will be indifferent to Him as well. You will picture Him perhaps as a nice guy who gives you stuff once in a while. Nothing to worry about, unless you really need Him. If a child grows up with abusive parents or has to suffer the death of a parent, and they prayed for God’s help through the trauma, they might then think that God doesn’t care about them. He wants them to suffer. Different views of God come from different experiences that people have in life.
I get the sense that most people just don’t think about God much at all nowadays. The popular God of America is the TOLERANT God who demands nothing and allows everything. He loves everyone as they are. This is not the holy and righteous God of the Bible. So they don’t take God seriously. They don’t think God really expects anything out of us, that maybe He just wants us to be happy. They don’t think God really does much of anything besides maybe keep the clock ticking in this world. This is a problem! He’s much more than that! The Bible makes that clear.
Luther’s world didn’t treat God as if He were non-existent. They constantly faced death through plagues and war, and they were quite sure God was sending all of it on them. God was angry. God was just. Nobody could match up, no matter how much they did. Luther felt this more than most. But as an intelligent and gifted man, Luther was charged with teaching the Bible. He was terrified of God, but desperately he HAD to dig into it. God worked through the Word to open Himself up to Luther and show him another side that Luther didn’t know about.
In studying that term, “righteousness of God,” Luther discovered a different sense of God. It was one that Augustine had spoken of years before, and Luther was a part of that Catholic brotherhood. The idea is, that if God is unyielding in His DEMANDS, then God would also be unyielding in His PROMISES. So if He promises something, He will keep His PROMISES as well. He is righteous with His threats but ALSO with HIs promises. The gospel revealed how God promised that He sent His Son Jesus to fulfill the justice and wrath of God on the cross. Paul described it this way in Romans chapter 3,
There is no difference, 23 because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God publicly displayed as the atonement seat through faith in his blood. God did this to demonstrate his justice.
God PROMISED that Jesus paid the full redemption price, the suffering and death, that WE ALL owe God. (That’s what “redemption” means, to buy back.) Jesus paid Himself for the punishment He demanded. The cross fulfilled His justice. Here God’s Son died as the substitute for the sins of the world. This God is not just a demanding and angry God who doesn’t bend. He kept this promise even though it was painful for Him. He didn’t and He wouldn’t go back on His Word. He also decided to GIVE what He demanded when He gave His one and only Son.
Here’s another huge thing for Luther. He was constantly told that the only way to GET the grace of God was to jump through his Catholic loops. Go to confession. Become a monk. Study the Bible. Pray. Pay your indulgences. Even the grace and mercy of God became hidden under the rules and regulations of Catholicism. It became a holy type of ponzi scheme. It’s how the Catholic Church kept her people under her thumb. It’s like putting a twenty dollar bill on a fishing line and constantly pulling it away every time you think you have it.
The Gospel revealed a completely different way of righteousness. God’s grace and mercy wasn’t something that Luther needed to go and get. It was already there in Christ. God already was and is gracious and merciful in the suffering and death of Jesus, already accomplished. Forgiveness was already won for him. It wasn’t a matter of Luther earning it. It was simply looking at God in a different light, a gracious light, a forgiving light, believing Him to be different than He’d ever seen before, in Jesus. When this GRACIOUS God was opened up to Him, He had everything God demanded. All of this righteousness could be his right NOW through faith. It was a righteousness FROM God. It wasn’t HIS righteousness that he had to earn, it was JESUS’ righteousness that could be given to him and placed on him through faith. Luther wrote,
I began to understand that the justice of God is that by which the just lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. This, then, is the meaning: the justice of God is revealed by the gospel: the passive justice with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “The just one lives by faith.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of all Scripture showed itself to me. (Vol. 33, p. 261)
Look at the Gospel for today and what kind of a God do we find? A God who invites both good AND BAD to the wedding, who dresses them all in the same clothing, the clothing of Jesus, and that’s ALL He wants. Who would imagine that this holy and righteous God would give such a SIMPLE and EASY way to be saved, all through the righteousness and works of His SON! NOBODY would expect this from the God who demands perfection, who threatens hell, who sends a Flood to destroy thousands of people. Here is a God who promises me complete and total righteousness when I cling to Jesus, and Him ALONE. It is given to us BY faith, and it is spoken to us FOR faith.
Paul writes, in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed by faith, for faith, just as it is written, “The righteous will live by faith.” Think about how Paul’s life entirely changed. First of all, he HAD life. He knew he was forgiven. He knew heaven was his. He knew God loved him in Christ and would work all out for his salvation. So he threw himself selflessly into the calling he was given to reach out to the Gentiles. He had honor and prestige as a Jewish leader. He threw all of that away when Jesus called him. So he said, I am not ashamed of the gospel. Think about it. He was going to Rome, the hotbed of society and philosophical thought. Paul went there to talk about God born in a manger, dying on the cross, rising from the dead. Most of them would laugh at him. Others would hate him. But he wasn’t ashamed of it.
Jesus mentions that concept of being unashamed as well. In Mark 8:38 he said, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” Are you ashamed of the fact that we believe in Creation or the roles of men and women? Are you ashamed of how we regard the Lord’s Supper as such a holy and powerful thing? Are you ashamed of how we claim the entire Word of God is all inspired and true? Are you ashamed to bow before Jesus on a Sunday morning and confess your sins? Do you gladly receive the absolution? Does it seem an odd thing to kneel before God and beg for forgiveness and mercy? Do you eagerly tell your friends where you go to church? Do you ask them if they believe in Jesus? Or would such a thing be embarrassing for you to ask? Why is that?
Paul was not ashamed of the God in the manger, the God on the cross, the God in the grave. He was not ashamed of the resurrected God who rules invisibly over the heavens and the earth, even though many of his former friends and family made fun of him for it and tried to kill him over it.
The story is told of the little boy whose mother would walk him to school every morning. The boy always kissed his mother on the cheek. But there was a funny thing about his mother, her cheek and her neck were malformed and scarred. As he grew older, he started to notice it more, and he was a little embarrassed to be with her because of how she looked. He asked her to stop walking him to school because some of his friends made fun of her looks. One day, one of the other mothers noticed how he was distancing himself from his mom. She asked him about it. He was embarrassed and didn’t want to say anything. So she said, “Do you know how your mom got those scars? When you were 6 months old you were in a car accident. Your car started on fire. Your mother was able to get herself free rather easily, but the car had started on fire. She had to break through the back window and tear you out of your car seat in order to free you. You came out without a problem, but that’s how she was burned, saving you.” She didn’t have to say another word. That boy gave his mother a kiss goodbye every day for the rest of grade school and proudly let her take him to the door from then on in when he understood the sacrifice she made for him.
Martin Luther’s life entirely changed when he saw the grace and mercy of God, free of charge, in the righteousness of Christ. He risked his life in order to spread the Gospel. He no longer lived under the law of the Catholic Church. He now lived under the law of freedom and forgiveness. He worked tirelessly and wrote tirelessly in order to spread the Gospel when he saw God in a different light. Paul said, the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. The word for power is dynamis in the Greek. It’s where we get the word dynamite from. It’s powerful. Jesus is powerful. He gives us LIFE!
If you have misperceptions of God, you won’t have this freedom. Have you only been looking at the death and sin in this world, and forgotten to see the death and sacrifice of Jesus for you? Have you been filled with darkness and despair from your own experiences? It’s so easy to see only darkness and think God is to blame for it all. God has revealed to us a different side to Him, a beautiful Him. Look to Jesus! There’s nothing to be ashamed of. He’s not afraid to say “I love you!” Why be ashamed of saying it back? You never get too old to hear it, do you?
Our son recently posted a poster picture from college that was put on the internet. On the board he wrote, “I love you mommy.” It was funny, but that’s an awesome thing. God wants us to say the same thing to Him, sing the same thing to Him, and share with other people about how lovely our God is. How could we be ashamed of a God who came into our world, willingly decided to be weak, in order to die on a cross for us? What a wonderful God this is! When we believe in Him we really have life, and we feel like living, no matter how miserable life can be.
I was glad the day my parents brought me to see my old pastor years after he had retired. I saw a jovial and happy man that I hadn’t remembered experiencing in church. It showed me that he wasn’t only this fiery man with white hair. And really, perhaps if I had listened closer, I would have seen this man also from the pulpit as well. But that one little glimpse of him showed me a kind and gentle man who truly cared for me and was a loving man. That one afternoon with him stuck in my mind more than any other time.
I wonder how many people are under the deception that God is only angry or unloving: that God just doesn’t care about them or there is no hope for them. We have a powerful thing called the Gospel, and a powerful God and Savior Jesus Christ who can change the world for people. We can open up an entirely different God for them, one that they would never expect, when we bring them to Jesus and show them the love of God who came to this world to live and die for them on the cross. Paul was not ashamed. Luther was not ashamed. Neither are we. I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. Amen.
