I am not ashamed of the gospel,
because it is the power of God
that brings salvation
to everyone who believes:
first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.
Bible Rank: 40
There is a second critical piece that I must mention in Romans 1:16. And it comes with a story.
In the first congregation that I served, a man showed up one Sunday. He'd just moved to town and was eager to serve. Articulate and engaging, he said he'd regularly filled in doing sermons and visitations for the pastor at his last church whenever his pastor was out of town.
My first thought was, "Great! Every church needs strong, capable, willing servants."
My second thought obviously was, let’s get to know this eager individual.
That Sunday, he came to Sunday School. I was teaching on Revelation, in a series of passages that took place in Jerusalem, the climactic end-place in the end times drama. And the man made intelligent comments in class ... about the judgment that much of Scripture, including Revelation, says will come.
The second week in class, he was more vocal. Most Jews didn't fair well in this passage of Revelation, and he was quick to point this out.
By the third week he was very vocal in his opposition to the Jews. One comment I remember was "the Jews heard they are God's chosen people and forever act like it."
I quickly steered that class discussion in a totally different direction and avoided all his attempts to draw it back to what was obviously a heated anti-semitism.
Then the next week, I did my research. I read books. Called our denomination's department that stood against anti-Semitic rhetoric. I met with our local Rabbi to help me understand Jewish thought so that I could clearly articulate a Biblical defense of love, charity, and proper Jewish-Christian relations.
One of the phrases I remember most from my conversation with the Rabbi was after I fed him the man's line about the entitlement that many Jews supposedly feel about being named God's chosen people. The Rabbi quickly clarified a proper Jewish understanding of this term. He said, "Jews don't view this as a blessing! We've been chosen for hard and thankless job. We were chosen to represent Yahweh to the world, and the world hates us for it. God loves us, but He's more demanding of us than any other people. It's a blessing and a curse. Look at our history ... it's not an easy responsibility!"
Armed with this information, what did I do?
I would have called the man so that we could have had this discussion privately rather than as a potential showdown in a Sunday School class ... but I didn't have his number.
So I showed up to class nervous. But the man wasn't there. He wasn't there the next week either. I soon found out that he'd been fired from his job and moved out of town. (Whew!)
Today's verse reveals the pattern of the spreading of the Gospel. Jesus was a Jew. He came as the Jewish Messiah. God loves the Jews and the covenants God made with Abraham and his descendants will never be broken. And that's step one.
Step two is that Jesus was a Jew, and he came not just as the Jewish Messiah, but as the Savior of the World. God loves, therefore, Jews and Gentiles! He has a plan for the whole world.
There's a pernicious philosophy -- alive in even some quarters of the church -- that says that the Church is the new Israel. It's called replacement theology, saying, because the Jews rejected Jesus, calling for his crucifixion, those who didn't crucify him and came to believe in name inherited all the promises once made to Israel.
Oddly, you can make a Biblical case for replacement theology ... if you're careful to leave ought the whole counsel of the New Testament. Romans 9 and 10 and the whole of Revelation clearly reveal that God has not forsaken Israel. They've rebelled (like we all do daily) but the drama of redemption clearly unfolds with a reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles.
In Christ’s Love,
a guy who stands with Israel
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