“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ironic secrets of good writing is that it takes longer to write shorter pieces than it does longer ones. It’s easy to dump a bunch of words out on a page. Pairing those down to the point that you have just the right words takes longer. The same goes with explaining a large and complicated idea. Boiling things down to few words that are clear and compelling takes work. With that in mind, these two verses from Paul must have taken a lot of work. This is one of the clearest, most direct statements of the Gospel ever written. Let’s talk about it.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s just dive right in today starting right at the beginning. Paul opens his declaration of the Gospel by insisting he is not ashamed of it. Why would someone be ashamed of the Gospel? If you are a follower of Jesus and have been for some time, you’re probably trying in vain to think of a reason. If you’re not a follower of Jesus, by the time you’ve read this far, you’ve probably thought of about a dozen or more reasons. Let me join you in sharing some of those with the first group.

Paul himself has laid out in other places why someone might be ashamed of the Gospel. As he wrote to the Corinthian church, it is a stumbling block to the Jews and it is foolishness to the Gentiles. To modernize that thinking a bit, every other religion ever created offers some sort of a path of self-righteousness. That is, they assure their followers that if you do the right things, you can obtain salvation. You will have earned it. Christianity, though, stands apart from the pack and insists that salvation cannot be earned. It is only received by faith.

For those folks who put themselves outside of any sort of religion, their position is that they are too wise and intelligent to need the crutch of religion to make their lives better. They are perfectly capable of using the wonder of reason and science to get themselves to where they are trying to go. They have no need for some made-up god to swoop in and do everything for them or else petulantly condemn them for failing to live up to its standards. To put that another way, they are sure they don’t need saving in the first place. The Gospel, though, insists that we are lost and enslaved and powerless to do anything about it on our own.

Everything about it is backwards to how we naturally think whether through the lens of other religious worldviews or a secular one. We want to save ourselves. The Gospel says we need saving. We want to make our own way. The Gospel says God’s way is best. We want to be enough on our own. The Gospel says Jesus is enough for us. There is plenty about the Gospel that could make someone who is committed to a worldview other than Christian theism and interested in appealing to folks who feel the same ashamed at the thought of embracing it.

But Paul says he’s not ashamed. Why? Because it is the power of God for salvation. Over the course of the next two and a half chapters, Paul is going to lay out why both of those things are necessary. He’s going to make clear that we need salvation and why the power of God is the only hope we have for receiving it. For now, let’s just be clear about the fact that salvation is a miracle of the power of God. We can’t contribute anything to that process. He is the one who makes us new. He is the one who transforms our hearts and renews our minds. He is the one who has made the pathway available in the first place. It is all His doing using His power. We don’t have any real power of our own anyway.

Let’s also be clear that we do in fact need saving. We are helpless before the sin that grips our hearts. We are so helpless we often can’t even recognize its power. We are drowning, but we have been drowning for so long that we don’t know what breathing feels like anymore. And because of the shame involved in the acknowledgment of our helplessness, when someone first tries to convince us we are drowning, we angrily and arrogantly insist nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, someone has to be lost before they can be saved. But convincing someone who isn’t experiencing the hard consequences of sin of their lostness can be a tall order. The hardest people to share the Gospel with aside from those who have sampled and consciously rejected it (almost always because of a bad church experience of some kind) are unbelievers whose lives seem pretty good by all observational standards.

For those who are caught in the hard consequences of sin and who are perfectly, painfully aware of their need for salvation, the challenge is often not convincing them of their need for salvation so much as convincing them God considers them worthy of it. Paul addresses that here too. The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. The Gospel is for everyone. No one is exempt from it. No one is too far gone for it. If you are a person created by God, the salvation of the Gospel is for you. Period. Close the book. Shut down the printer. Put the publishing company out of business.

The next thing Paul says seems odd. Salvation is first for the Jews. If you’re not a Jew – a group that includes the vast majority of everyone who has ever read these two verses – that sounds a little preferential of God. Well, it is, but not in the way you are perhaps first inclined to think. Salvation and an entrance into God’s kingdom was offered to the Jews first because they were the ones through whom God did all the work to bring it into reality for the rest of us.

A few years ago I was one of the very first people to sign up for a ministry that has grown rather quickly since then. Because I was among that very first group of subscribers, not only did I get locked into a premium price that will last until I cancel my subscription, but I have been able to have first access to a variety of features as they have released. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t still intended to be for everyone, but my early enrollment just meant I got the first crack at them. God’s kingdom was opened first to the people He worked through to build it. But it was never for only them. It was always to be for everyone.

The second part of Paul’s declaration here is that the Gospel reveals God’s righteousness. Righteousness is just a fancy word for right relationships. A person who is righteous is rightly related to people and to God. It’s a both-and affair. You can’t be rightly related to God if you’re not rightly related to people, and if you’re not rightly related to people, you’re not going to be rightly related to the God who created and loves them. When talking about God’s righteousness, His being rightly related to Himself means that He is being consistent with His character. The Gospel reveals God’s consistency with His character in that it honors both His justice and His love. God satisfied His justice in Christ’s willing sacrifice of His sinless life on our behalf. And, once Jesus satisfied God’s just demand for payment for the violent taking of what was His (our lives) by sin, He was able to extend His love to everyone else. Justice and love. God’s righteousness. As for being right with us, the reconciliation made available through Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection makes a right relationship with Him possible.

This right standing with God through Jesus, though, is only attainable by faith. That is, we can’t see any of this unless we are willing to take God at His word. Like we said before, our natural inclination is to deny that we need saving in the first place. And even once we become convinced of that, we want to save ourselves. The sin of pride clings hard to our hearts. We’ll accept some help from God, but we want the final product to be something we have achieved on our own. But we can’t. At all. We can only receive it. What’s more, we receive it based on the testimony of those who have come before us. We have to trust in their word. We weren’t there for the resurrection. We didn’t see the crucifixion. We put our trust in the historical claim and philosophical ideas and demonstrate that trust by adjusting our lives in light of His word. That’s faith.

There are all sorts of reasons to believe. But at the end of the day, the critic’s accusation that faith lies at the heart of the Gospel is correct. We can’t see God. Science can’t disprove His existence because it’s not equipped for such a task. But neither can it prove Him. The argument for the historicity of the resurrection is awfully compelling, but it is undeniably based on the writings of the earliest followers of Jesus. The final decision here, though, comes down to the simple question of whether you are going to entrust your life to a God you can’t see, but who has promised salvation and whose followers boast loudly of His transformational power in their own lives, or in the things you can accomplish on your own. The righteous – those who are rightly related to God – will indeed live by their faith.

Starting tomorrow and for the next few weeks, we will journey with Paul as he fleshes all of this out and makes the case that this faith is worth your time to give. I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride.