Unveiled - the secret to a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit

Want a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit? Well here are four things that we should do:

1. Study the Bible more
2. Pray more
3. Spend more time worshiping the Lord with other Christians
4. Obey the Lord more

Not much of a secret? No it isn't because the way to knowing God is open to all and the best thing of all is that God Himself wants to have a deeper relationship with us. He wants it so much that He came to live among us. He wants it so much that He sent His Son to die for us. Jesus returned to the Father so the Holy Spirit could come to us.

The four "secrets" listed above have been tried and tested by saints throughout the ages. There is no secret, God revealed the extent of His love for us two thousand years ago when He sent His Son Jesus to be with us.

Romans 1:7 - Grace and Peace

We are those who are loved by God, and as such are called to be His saints. This means that we are set apart for His purposes. We need to appreciate this. If we look at our lives and try to understand them in the world’s terms we will end up confused. There will be times when it makes sense, for we will receive God’s blessing and things will be going well, but at others it will make no sense at all. For there will be times when we are hated by the world and we will suffer for Christ.

We now come to the blessing and it is similar to the blessing Paul uses in most of his letters. “Peace” was equivalent to the Jewish blessing of “shalom”. The common greetings would invoke a blessing in the name of a deity, so Paul invoking his blessing in the name of “God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ” is highly significant, for it shows that Paul considered the Father and the Son to be on equal terms. Moreover, the term “lord” as used by Paul is equivalent to saying Jesus is God. There are those who say that “lord” was just a common term of respect and does not imply deity, but such arguments ignore the context of usage of the term by Paul.

Romans 1:6 - You who are called to Christ

One of the ongoing theological debates in which Romans is central is between Calvinism and Arminianism. One stresses the sovereignty of God, the other the free will of man. More recently (though it actually has a long history) is Molinism. Calvinism gives priority to the sovereignty of God, Arminianism gives priority to human free will  (these descriptions are by necessity inadequate because of their brevity, but it stresses the main point). Molinism seeks to give equal weight to both, and this is what I like about Molinism, though I prefer the term human responsibility to human free will. This seems closest to what the Bible teaches. What I don’t like about Molinism is the way it seeks to explain how this happens, I think we need to be very careful about being dogmatic about how the sovereignty of God and human responsibility interact.

So what has all this to do with this verse? Well it could be interpreted as saying that the believers in Rome are part of the elect. Or it could be interpreted as meaning that the Gentiles in Rome are among those who are called to belong to Christ. In practical terms it doesn’t matter much, and indeed we should take it in both senses. As believers we should consider ourselves to be those called by God, there has been a sovereign call from the King that we should belong to Christ and we should seek to live our lives in the light of that call, of that sovereign decree. On the other hand, we should view all the people around us as people that God has called to believe in Christ, it is God’s command and purpose that all people believe in Christ. Not all will, but we should seek to make the gospel known to all.

Romans 1:5 - Grace and apostleship

“Through Him we received grace and apostleship ...” There are several interesting things in this verse. First of all grace. We tend to think of grace in very passive terms, ie we have been forgiven for our sins by grace. Now this is true, but there is much more to grace than this. Here Paul talks about receiving grace and apostleship to call the Gentiles to faith. Through grace Paul was appointed as an apostle. God gave him the grace to succeed in his mission. Naturally speaking there was no way that Paul should have become an apostle to the Gentiles in the first place, and no way in which he should have succeeded in establishing this weird religion throughout so much of the Roman Empire. God’s grace enables us to achieve much more than we have any right to expect. We should ask God what He wants to achieve in and through our lives, what has He given us the grace to achieve? Then it says we received apostleship, so the term is being used to apply to more than just Paul. Finally, The Gentiles are called to faith and obedience. We so often forget to associate faith with obedience. To believe the gospel is not a choice, but an act of obedience. To refuse to believe is an act of disobedience. The choice is whether to obey God or not, and the consequences are a matter of life or death. And when we do believe in Christ a lives take on a new course, we receive a new life and that life is one of increasing and deeper obedience to God.

Romans 1:4 - Son of God

Now this verse needs to be considered carefully, for to our ears it can sound as though there was a time when Jesus was not the Son of God, for it says “was appointed the Son of God”. There are various things we need to understand. First, verse 2 already says that Jesus was His Son, and a general point in understanding the Bible is never to take a verse in isolation. This is particularly relevant when considering anything relating to the trinity. Our experience is of people who are one person. God is one God, but three persons. Our thinking and language don’t naturally fit with this, so any one sentence cannot possibly adequately describe the nature of God. We also need to know that son can be used in various ways. The kings of Israel and Judah were referred to as sons of God when they became king. It is this latter sense that is inspiring Paul’s thought in this verse. When God raised Jesus from the dead He was shown to be king of kings, He was appointed as God’s king of all the earth. God declared that Christ was Israel’s true king, and indeed, our king as well. Jesus is the king through whom all the Old Testament promises are fulfilled. And all this happened through the “Spirit of holiness”. Jesus had lived a life of perfect obedience, because of His sinlessness He was worthy to pay the price for all our sins.

Romans 1:2,3 - The gospel regarding His Son

1:2

“which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures”. Jesus did not appear out of nothing, He was not a radical new departure, rather He was and is the complete fulfilment of all that was promised in the Old Testament. Romans is the one of Paul’s letters that contains the greatest use of Scripture, and no doubt he was thinking about this, looking forward to what he was going to say later, when he wrote this bit. God promises what He is going to do before it happens. Notice also the implicit statement that the Old Testament is the word of God. Prophets here obviously does refer to the people we think of as prophets, like Isaiah, Daniel etc, but it also includes people like Abraham, Moses and David.

1:3

The good news is the good news about Jesus Christ, His Son. The Old Testament had promised that David would have a descendent on the throne forever. David’s natural descendants radically failed to fulfil this. Solomon did well for a time, then became a disaster. Most of the kings after that were just a disaster, there some good ones, but they all ultimately failed. Now for many years Israel had not had a king at all. In human terms Jesus was descended from David. Now ask yourself this “would you be bothered if Jesus was not a descendant of David?” I suspect the answer for most of us is no, it really doesn’t matter to us. Yet God had said the Messiah would be a descendant of David, and so He is. This has implications for the Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel and Israel’s current place in God’s plans. There are those who see Israel as having no place other than that of any other people group (“replacement theology”). I can see no support for this in Scripture at all, Israel still does have a place, and a special place, but their salvation will come only through faith in Christ, as it does for anyone else. Paul deals with this matter very fully in chapters 9-11.

Romans 1:1 - Set Apart

Paul’s introduction to his letters follow the standard form of letters in those days, with the name of the writer, and the recipients being mentioned. They also mentioned the purpose of the letter and include a blessing, in the pagan world this would typically be a blessing in the name of some idol or other. Naturally, Paul’s letters were a Christianised version! The introduction to Romans is longer than that to his other letters. Paul knew that this was going to be a very weighty epistle, outlining the great themes of the gospel.

First of all Paul outlines who he is. He is a servant or slave of Christ Jesus, an apostle, and one set apart for the gospel. Let’s look at each of these.

Servant or slave requires some explanation and is much richer in meaning than we commonly imagine. When we hear the word slave we tend to think of the slave trade and someone who had lost all rights. Now a slave did have to do as they were told, but slavery was different in the 1st century and was very varied. Some slaves had more power than aristocrats in Rome, and some aristocratic women even married into slavery to improve their status! There is also an additional aspect of slavery that might have been in Paul’s thinking. A slave could buy their freedom, and when they did they would become the “slave” of a god or idol. Now of course the idol was a nothing, so this “slavery” meant they were free and someone would boast of being a slave of Apollo, or whatever “god” they had sold themselves to in order to earn their freedom. So being “a slave of Christ Jesus” could also have been a declaration of Paul’s freedom.

Apostle also has a range of meanings. In general it means one who was sent, and Paul was sent by Christ to take the gospel to the Gentiles. Then there is the specific meaning that applies to the eleven disciples, they had to have been with Jesus and to be witnesses to the resurrection. Paul falls into this category as well, though he had not been a disciple. He had met Jesus on the Damascus road, and refers to himself as one “abnormally born” (1 Cor 15:8), acknowledging the difference between himself and the others. It these apostles who set up the church, and on which the church is built (Eph 20:20). The term apostle is also used to apply more widely in the New Testament as well.

So a question that arises is “are there apostles today?”. In the sense of the twelve foundational apostles the answer is a definite no. In the more general sense, I would say yes.  In the New Testament an apostle was someone who was completely sold out for the gospel, who did signs and wonders, who proclaimed the gospel and suffered for the gospel and for Christ. If someone does this then I have no objection to that person being called an apostle. However, the term apostle is bandied about much too freely in some circles and is used as a badge of honour. Rather than arguing about whether someone can be called an apostle or not, we would be better on focusing on increasing our devotion to Christ and living for Him.