“And So To Rome”
“AND SO TO ROME”
ROMANS 1:9-12
Is the Christian life all receiving?
Paul was writing his letter to Rome, probably in Corinth, where he spent three winter months at the end of AD 56 and the beginning of 57 (Acts 20:3). The Italian peninsula did not seem far away. Many years before a grand plan had taken shape in his mind, no less than a strategic attack on the Roman empire. Cyprus had prompted the thought. He had first put it into motion when, to the annoyance of the junior member of the party, he had abandoned the sea-port, and made for Antioch of Pisidia, the bastion of Roman power in central Asia Minor (Acts 13:13f.).
Nine years had passed since that adventure in evangelism, and Paul had seen the fulfillment of much of that which he had set out to do. Christian churches, “cells” of witness, were planted in the great centers of power, religion, learning and trade, in the eastern half of the empire. He wrote from Corinth, the nodal point of central Mediterranean communications. There were Christians in Athens, the intellectual hub of the world. There was an active church in Philippi, old fortress of northern Greece. Ephesus, religious center of Asia, and proconsular seat, had its witness. Paul hoped to see the message thus placed radiate down the roads and trade routes, permeating the vast power-system for Christ.
It was a magnificently imaginative idea. There remained the central core of the empire, Rome itself, and the western bastion, Spain, which was to provide Rome with emperors, as it had already provided men of accomplishment and letters—Seneca, for example, philosopher and tutor of the emperor, and Lucan, the decade’s best known poet. Spain was Paul’s next objective, with Rome en route. Paul was not to know the painful and circuitous route by which he was to come to Rome (15:24-28). The pilgrimage to Jerusalem, on which he had set his heart, lay ahead, and against all opposition and advice he set out on that path—a fruitless errand, if the brief account be read rightly, but one which God turned to good, for all that tumult in Jerusalem and prison in Caesarea lay in the way.
Observe in 1:11f. that Paul speaks humbly of gaining blessing and comfort in Rome, as well as giving it. Students in class, and congregations in a church, should remember that there is a two-way communication in spiritual things, a giving as well as a getting. And could this (an awesome thought) be also true of God and us? Is this why he made us free?
Exercise Trace the pattern of Paul’s churches on a map.