Concord of Acts and Epistles – Part two

The letter to the Romans was written from Greece towards the end of the Apostle Paul’s third missionary journey, before he returned to Jerusalem. The main object of the letter was to show that, in the sight of God, the Gentile believers were on equal footing with the Jews in respect of their religious standing. He was anxious to make it clear that justification was by faith and not by the works of the law; that it became necessary, therefore, to appoint another medium or condition, in which the Jewish position was merged and lost; that Abraham’s justification was before the law and independent of it; that Jewish converts were to consider the law as now dead; that what the Law could not do be­cause it was weak through the flesh, God had done by sending His own son, whereby there had been established a society of believers in Jesus collected independently from Jews and Gentiles. There is reason, as we shall see, to think that the apostle did not confine the expression of his views to the letter, but spoke of them openly. Such views led many Jewish

people to think that he was “teaching all the Jews that are among the gentiles to forsake Moses.” When he arrived in Jerusalem, members of the church there had been informed of his teachings, not by the Roman letter, but by report. They pointed out that the effect of his doctrine on many thousands of zealous Jews had been disastrous. The apostle disclaimed their misinterpretation of what he had said. To show that he had not abandoned the Law, he accepted the request of the elders of the Church to purify himself, as a token that he “walked orderly and kept the Law.” All that the gentiles were called upon to do, however, was “to keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled and from fornication” (Acts 21:20-27).

It is clear from what is written in the Roman epistle, and from what Paul had said publicly before he went to Jerusalem, that the reception which he received from the elders when he reached there was just what we should suspect.