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The rapper Ice-T shocked his way to fame when he and his band, Body Count, released Cop Killer and promoted it on their concert tour. He punctuated a later article about a compilation album with obscene words, but with little shock effect. Shock gets attention, but boredom soon sets in.
Paul wrote a shocking letter to believers in Rome. His description of Gentile rebellion against God and morality is shocking enough. Yet Paul does not shock by describing depravity. The shock comes from the tolling bell of God’s judgment. The Gentiles suppressed the truth and turned to the folly of idolatry. So God gave them up to sexual impurity, to degrade their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and God gave them up to sexual perversion. They did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, and God gave them up to every kind of wickedness. They knew death to be the penalty for their acts, but they continued in them and rewarded with celebrity those who practiced them.
Paul warns his Roman readers with a shocking finality. The judgment of the Gentiles who despise God’s holiness means that sinners are paid in the coin of their own perversion.
The dynamic of the downward spiral of evil is not reversible. God gives up on sinners by abandoning them to the teeming evil of their own hearts. We see the process in the life of a Stalin or a Hitler; we see it also in the history of cultures, including our own. Students of tribal religion often find that the tribe knows of a supreme God who is no longer worshiped. Houston, the city where I reside, has many large churches where the Gospel is preached and believed. But in its dense traffic, one also sees many cars with the early church’s fish symbol given legs and the name “Darwin” substituted for the name of Jesus.
Nothing in a lost world can offer a rescue from the sweep of damnation. No rock of refuge can deliver from the flood. But the shocking Gospel truth is that God the Judge saves from His own judgment. Gospel preaching does not offer divine power to help us coordinate a massive moral effort. The history of the Old Testament showcases that such effort is worse than useless. When the dynamic of sin and judgment reached a climax in the time of Noah, the rainbow appeared as a sign of hope. Yet the new age that began with a drunken Noah did not bring a reversal of the sinking spiral of sin. It brought only the repetition of the promise of God’s salvation.
Paul does present the shock of God’s judgment—the vortex of evil would become a hurricane of destruction. Yet the real shock in Paul’s epistle comes in his description not of human rebellion but of God’s overpowering grace. The glory of grace brought judgment on the darkness. Paul told the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill that the era when God had withheld judgment was over. God had guaranteed that by raising Jesus Christ from the dead to judge the world. Paul presented this shocking news as the climax of a cosmic struggle. The risen Lord had defeated the prince of darkness and the powers of the air. Those spiritual powers, the host of fallen angels and demons, had made paganism their kingdom. Their chains were broken, for Christ is Lord of all at the right hand of God.
Paul proclaims “the mystery kept secret since the world began, but now made manifest” (Rom. 16:25ff). He calls the nations to the obedience of faith in the name of Jesus. When Paul spoke to the elders from Ephesus, he used shocking language. He charged them to “ ‘shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood’ ” (Acts 20:28). The shock of the heart of the Gospel could not be clearer. What makes the Gospel shocking is mystery that goes beyond words. The God of the fathers, the God of glory, “who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16)—this is the God who bought the church of lost sinners at the cost of His own blood. Yes, the Bible reveals the triune God. It was not the Father but the Son who poured out His blood as a sacrifice on the cross. Yet the blood of Jesus, in the body that had been prepared for Him, was the blood of the incarnate Son of God. The shock of the Gospel is the fact that God Himself paid the price of our redemption. The mystery of the Trinity is that the three persons of the Godhead are one God. God the Father paid the price when He gave His only begotten Son. When the Father did not answer the cry of Jesus from the cross, the Father was giving His only Son. We can think only in human terms, but the terms are true.
Paul begins this epistle with a greeting in the name of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He does not use a simple formula, however. Rather, he begins with his own calling as an apostle. His letter presents the thunderbolt of his message. He preached the collision of the overwhelming grace of God with the dark stronghold of sin’s prison. The shock of Paul’s Gospel is like the earthquake that shook the prison of Philippi, where Paul and Silas sat with backs bleeding and their feet in stocks (Acts 16). They sang at midnight because they knew the greater power of the Gospel. The earthquake was but a sign. The conversion of the Philippian jailer showed the reality of the greater impact of the Gospel.