Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God to salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew first… The success of Christianity has won for it the respect even of its enemies. I. THE SUBJECT WHICH IT EMPHASISES — the "gospel." In the context we have clearest evidence that a knowledge of certain facts and truths associated therewith existed among those to whom the apostle wrote. These facts and truths all clustered around the person, life work, example, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The bare historical record of these, however, was not the gospel any more than mere creeds or systems of Christian truth, however important these may be. The members of the body are the servants of the living soul; so the gospel is the animating spirit which employs as its instruments facts and doctrines, precepts and institutions. II. THE REFERENCE WHICH OUR TEXT IMPLIES — Not ashamed of the gospel! Strange language, surely, for Paul to use, is it not? Did he not love the gospel with a most ardent affection? Did he not prize it above all things, and glory in it as an ineffable trust Divinely committed to his charge: How could Paul content himself with declaring that he was "not ashamed of the gospel"? The reference here implied brings us back to the words in which Christ described His mission to the world at its commencement (Luke 4:18), and also, when replying to the messengers sent to Him by John the Baptist, from the prison (Luke 7:22). Christ's heart glowed with love to all; but most intensely towards the poor, the vast struggling masses of humanity, denied universally the rights of citizens and of manhood. Slavery and class privilege were the cornerstone of that Pagan civilisation, then so powerful, and to these the gospel did not offer any terms of compromise; and so its advocates, as Paul tells us, were "made as the filth of the world, the off-scouring of all things." Enemies were constantly asserting that this "new religion drew to it the dregs of the population — peasants, mechanics, beggars, and slaves." Even long after the time of Paul, when Christianity had won many triumphs, we find Celsus, a haughty, heathen philosopher, remarking that "even the Christian teachers were wool workers, cobblers, and fullers — the most illiterate and vulgar of mankind." We can easily understand that some might waver in the. good cause, and that others, though favourable, might shrink from embracing it through fear of being treated as persons who had degraded themselves in the social scale. So the apostle Paul comes down for the moment from his wonted high position of "glorying "in the gospel and adopts a lowlier strain; he "was not ashamed of the gospel:" III. THE ARGUMENT UPON WHICH THIS DECLARATION RESTS. (J M. Cruickshank.) Parallel Verses KJV: For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. |
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