Praise for the Gospel

With his doctrinal exposition complete, his greetings to believers in the Roman church behind him, and his last-minute exhortations written down, there is but one last thing for Paul to do—sing the praises of God for His glorious Gospel. And so he closes this magnificent letter with a doxology, what Dr. James M. Boice calls “an ascription of praise to God.”

God, Paul declares, is “able to establish” the Romans. When he says “able,” Paul is simply saying that God has the power to do all He is said to do in these final three verses of Romans, for He is the omnipotent God. When Paul speaks of God “establishing” the Romans, he simply means that God saves and sustains His people; He raises them to new life and keeps them from falling. And God does all this by what Paul calls “my gospel.” As Boice explains: “What ‘my gospel’ actually means is ‘the true gospel,’ as the context makes clear. This true gospel is Paul’s only in the sense that he has appropriated it personally by a faith that involved committing his life to Jesus Christ, and in the sense that he was teaching it.” The Gospel, conveyed through “the preaching of Jesus Christ,” is God’s chosen instrument for salvation, for “ ‘there is no other name [than Jesus’] under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ ” (Acts 4:12).

Paul goes on to say that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has remained a mystery until the present time. God did not reveal the complete extent of His redemptive plan from the beginning, though His successive covenants with His people slowly unveiled more and more of what He intended to do. Even the prophets who wrote of it were not entirely sure what God was planning (1 Peter 1:10–11). Only in Paul’s time has the truth been “made manifest,” that is, revealed with great clarity. According to the commandment of God, at the proper time, Christ came into the world to live a perfect life and die a substitutionary death. Since that time, the Holy Spirit, working through the Old Testament Scriptures, the words of Jesus, and new revelation, has been equipping the apostles to bring the message of salvation to all nations, to call them to obey the divine command to repent and believe (Acts 17:30). God truly has done great things in his time, and Paul is eager to praise Him for it all.