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CONNIE: How hard is it to get into heaven? Have you heard of the twelve labors of Hercules? Well, fortunately the book of Romans reveals a better way than that. Join us as we study this book today. Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 70 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko.

CONNIE: Lonnie, I peeked ahead in the script, and I noticed that in your sermon today you’ll be talking a bit about the twelve labors of Hercules—the works he did in order to earn eternal life.

LONNIE: That’s right, Connie. Because I think that it’s important for us to understand the books of the Bible within their natural setting. And as we read the book of Romans, we see the apostle Paul dealing a lot with the contrast between being saved by our works or saved by the grace of God.

CONNIE: But in the book, he doesn’t mention anything about Hercules.

LONNIE: No, he uses mainly illustrations from the Bible—the Old Testament that is—but it’s clear that he’s writing to a church made up of members from Gentile as well as Jewish background. For these Gentile Roman believers, the main story they had to base their understanding of how to be saved upon was the story of Hercules—who literally worked his way into heaven.

CONNIE: Something the average Joe or Suzy can’t do.

LONNIE: Precisely. But Paul wants us to know that God has made salvation available to everyone through Christ Jesus. That’s the central point of Romans, as Dr. Smuts Van Rooyen pointed out when he spoke recently with Ken Wade

CONNIE: Let’s listen to that interview right now.

KEN: Dr. Smuts Van Rooyen, I just want to welcome you to our program today.

SMUTS: Thank you! It’s a pleasure.

KEN: When you think of Romans, and the whole message what would you say?

SMUTS: It’s like God saves us from a terrible dilemma. In chapter 1 the Gentiles who don’t have the law are found guilty. In chapter 2 the Jews who do have the law are found guilty before God...

KEN: It’s looking pretty bad.

SMUTS: Chapter 3 the conclusion is that all have sinned and that there in not one single person righteous and that we all fall short of the glory of God, and our mouths are stopped in guilt before Him. At that point Paul says that God reveals His righteousness, and it is that revelation of righteousness that saves us, that is so dramatic in this book.

KEN: How does He reveal His righteousness?

SMUTS: He reveals His righteousness through Jesus Christ. It’s as if a portion of people have been excluded from salvation, the Gentiles. God now reveals His justice by including them and the Jews, although all are innocent in His covenant and in His grace, and saving us.

KEN: So it’s God opening up the gates of heaven for everyone?

SMUTS: That’s it! Isn’t that fantastic!

KEN: That is. Now I know we were talking before we went on the air about Romans 4 and how the question comes up, Well, but didn’t Abraham the father of the Jews, didn’t get he righteousness by what he did? And what is Paul’s response to that?

SMUTS: In Romans 3 Paul concludes that we are saved without the law, and so the Jewish person is thinking, well is God nullifying the law, and God says, No, I’ll show you a portion from the law, that’s the Old Testament. And,
I’ll show you how Abraham was saved. He was saved by faith and not by his work.

KEN: His faith, his believing God is what God wanted and that is accounted to him as righteousness.

SMUTS: That’s right. What he believed is spelled out and that sort of grabs me. The first thing it says is, that Abraham believed God. But then it says more than that he believed in God, but believed in a God that justifies the ungodly,...It isn’t that he just believes God but that there is a particular God who justify’s the ungodly and that to me is fantastic, it’s unbelievable. Then he goes on to say that we believe in a God who calls what is not, as if it is, and we all know what we are not. We are not good enough, we are not righteous, but God calls us that. It’s this whole matter of God treating us in a way that we do not deserve to be treated.

KEN: That’s a fantastic thing that comes up over and over in the book of Romans, and when you get to chapter 8, we were talking about how God’s assurance is given to us.

SMUTS: Romans 8 ends with five unbelievable questions, and each one is grander than the other. Out of these questions we get our assurance.

KEN: That nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.

SMUTS: That is the fifth question. The first question he asks is, if God be for us who can be against us, and that is assuring. The second question he asks is, if God has given us His Son, how will He not with Jesus also freely give us all things? In other words God is not going to cheat us. The third question he asks, who will bring any charge against Gods elect? I mean it’s like how dare you charge this man. The fourth question is, who is he that condemns? That is threatening at first until you discover that it is the very Christ who is interceding for us, who is the one who condemns. Than the last question, who will separate us from the love of God? And he goes through these series of things and says that nothing will.

KEN: Well thank you so much for sharing your perspective on this great book. There’s so much more there, but unfortunately the clock won’t let us go through all of it. Just want to say how much I appreciate your insights.

SMUTS: I appreciate that.
CONNIE: That was Cynthia Clawson with the classic Christian hymn “Blessed Assurance.”

LONNIE: You know, we always try to select our music to help bring home the point of our sermon and the other parts of the program, so what better song to follow up on Dr. Van Rooyen’s comments about how nothing can separate us from God’s love.

CONNIE: And here’s something else we’d like you to have to remind you of the love God has for all His creation. It’s a book that starts out with these words: “Nature and revelation alike testify of God’s love. Our Father in heaven is the source of life, of wisdom, and of joy.”

LONNIE: Some of our listeners will recognize those words as the opening lines of the book Steps to Christ, a book we like to share whenever we get a chance.

CONNIE: In fact, we’d like to share a free copy with you today. If you’ll call us at 1-800-872-0055 and ask for a free copy of Steps to Christ, we’ll send one winging on its way to you.

LONNIE: We always love to hear from you, so why not call or write today—we’ll give our mailing address a bit later in the program.

CONNIE: But right now, let’s listen to Lonnie’s message for today, “Romans—the Gospel According to Paul.”

Romans—the Gospel According to Paul

How can you get into the kingdom of heaven?

How can you be assured of having eternal life?

Isn’t that just about the most important question you’ll ever face?

It’s the question Paul set out to answer in his letter to the Romans. In this letter, he was writing to a group of people who—because of their background—had very little hope of ever attaining eternal life in a happy place called heaven. The common belief among people in Rome in those days was that when a person died they went immediately to Hades—not necessarily a place of punishment, but certainly a dark, dismal, uninviting realm.

Roman religion held out very little hope for the common man or woman. In fact, the idea that a person could ever hope to attain to a heavenly home would hardly occur to someone steeped in Roman mythology. The only person who would come to mind as having achieved such a blissful reward would be Hercules—a half-divine son of Zeus—who managed to win his way into heaven only after accomplishing 12 Herculean tasks.

Salvation was not something available to the average person. It was reserved for emperors and supermen.

Thank God that Jesus came to earth to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is open to all that will receive it. But it was left to the apostle Paul to fully explain to the Roman church members how this wonderful, unimaginable gift could be theirs.

We know very little about the members of this church. But the one thing we can be pretty sure of is that there were many people from a pagan background as well as many from a Jewish background. And so, when Paul tackles the question of how all of us can be saved—no matter what our religious or racial background—he does us a tremendous favor. He helps us to see beyond our petty differences and distinctions to realize that we are all one and the same in the judgment of God.

This is a major step for a man who had been born, raised, and steeped in the Jewish traditions that set apart his race as the one chosen group—the only ones God was interested in saving eternally.

As a pharisaic Jew, Paul was part of one of the most exclusive religious groups in the world—they excluded everyone but themselves from God’s love and from salvation. But when he became a Christian, Paul’s whole outlook has changed. Now he knows that God is interested in saving the whole world. In Romans 3:29-30 he asks and answers the question that had to be on the mind of a congregation made up of a mixture of Jews and others: “Is God the God of Jews alone and not of the pagans too? Of the pagans too, most certainly, since there is only one God, and he is the one who will justify the circumcised because of their faith and justify the uncircumcised through their faith” (Jerusalem Bible).

The question is: Just how does this “faith thing” work?

How can people get into heaven without having to accomplish the twelve labors of Hercules?

Paul sets out to answer that question when he defines the Gospel—the Good News—that he proclaims. It’s found right at the beginning of his letter to the Romans—in chapter 1, verses 16 and 17. I want to read it to you from the New English Bible today, because I think the wording there really helps to draw out the full meaning of what Paul is trying to say to the Romans, and to us.

He writes: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the saving power of God for everyone who has faith—the Jew first, but the Greek also—because here is revealed God’s way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith.’ ”

Isn’t that beautiful—the Gospel is God’s way of righting wrong—a way that both starts and ends with faith.

But now, if you open the book of Romans and start to read—which I hope you’ll do today—you might notice that in the first couple of chapters Paul has quite a lot to say about being saved by doing good works. It’s almost as if he purposely set out to contradict himself when he writes about:

“God, who ‘will render to each one according to his deeds’: eternal life to those who by . . . doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality; but to those who . . . do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness—indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek;” (Romans 2:5-9 NKJV).

But Paul isn’t really contradicting himself at all. If you keep reading, you’ll quickly discover that he’s only using these thoughts as a stepping-stone to lead to something else. Because he goes on from there to challenge his readers: Which one of them has ever kept the law perfectly? In reality, that would probably be harder even than doing the twelve tasks of Hercules!

He points out some of the specific sins that people easily fall into, then asks those who pride themselves in their understanding of the law: “You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law?” (Rom 2:23 NKJV).

And he goes on from there to quote Scripture that sums up his point: If you’re depending on your own righteousness—on your own obedience to the law—to guarantee you a place in heaven, then you’re going to miss out. Because—and here I’m quoting from several verses in Romans 3:

“As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one;’ . . . They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one.’ . . . Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight” (Rom. 3:10, 12, 19, 20 NKJV).

That’s a problem!

If no one at all is good enough to be saved on the basis of what they’ve done, then how will anyone ever make it to heaven?

The answer to that question is what the Gospel is all about. And it’s also what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about. That’s why I call my message today, “Romans—the Gospel According to Paul.”

Paul moves on from that discouraging picture to make two main points about salvation. Number one: Salvation is a free gift from God, which we can receive on the basis of faith, but not on the basis of works (after all—if we earned it by our works, it wouldn’t be a gift!)

Number two: Good works result from salvation, not vice versa.

Let me say that again, because it’s so important: Paul’s second point about salvation is that good works result from salvation. Salvation does not result from good works.

Let’s look at point one first: Salvation is a free gift from God. Paul makes this point in these words: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:23-24 NIV).

But as soon as he writes this, he realizes that some people will be jumping up to contradict him—taking as their example good people like Abraham and David—surely God blessed and saved them because of their good works. So in chapter 4, Paul looks at those men’s lives and discovers that God “accounted” Abraham as righteous purely on the basis of his faith—not on the basis of his works. And David, for his part, proclaims that those who are forgiven (not those who have never sinned) are the ones who are blessed by God.

Paul then begins to speak of dying to our old way of life and coming to a new way of life in Jesus. Baptism is a symbol of this—as we’re buried under the water and raised to new life in the spirit.

But the most amazing part of all this is that the effect of coming to genuine faith in God through Jesus is not just some ethereal internal cleansing of our hearts. When we come to real, meaningful faith, it does something more. It cleans up our lives as well. And that’s the second point Paul emphasizes.

Joining Christ in His death to the things of the world changes how we live in the world. In Romans 6:5-7 we read “if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin” (NKJV).

Friend, this is one of the most amazing things about the gospel as it is revealed in the book of Romans. Paul begins by demolishing the idea that good works can earn us a place in heaven. And you would think then, that his conclusion would be that good works aren’t an important part of the Christian life.

But that’s not his conclusion at all. In fact, he devotes most of chapters 12-15 to exhorting people to proper Christian conduct—listing a multitude of good things that Christians should do and bad things they shouldn’t do!

It almost doesn’t make sense—it almost seems like he’s contradicting himself. But he’s not. And this is where the real power of the gospel as it’s presented in Romans lies.

Because Paul understands what happens when a person comes to genuine faith in God. It’s a life-changing, liberating, empowering experience. It changes everything!

Because when we accept Jesus as our Savior, we also accept Him as our Lord. And we invite Him to move into our hearts and replace our old ideas, our old motivations, our old lusts, with His pure, perfect love. His Spirit changes everything about us. Temptations we may have struggled against for years suddenly become unattractive. Hatred is replaced with love. Greed is overcome by generosity. Our lives are transformed day by day to be more and more in harmony with God’s perfect will.

And when that happens, nothing’s ever the same again!