Beyond the Romans Road

If you’ve ever been walked down the Romans Road, you know the verses: “all have sinned,” “the wages of sin is death,” “Christ died for us,” “confess with your mouth.” Every one of them is true. But they’re five sentences lifted out of a sixteen-chapter letter. They’re handed to you in an order Paul didn’t write them, cut off from the paragraphs they were living in.

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This study puts them back. It walks through Romans from 1:18 to the end of chapter 8, section by section, in the order Paul wrote it. Two questions run the whole way: who is Paul talking to, and what did he actually write? The answer to the first is on the letter’s opening page: “beloved of God, called to be saints” (Rom. 1:7). English hides the answer to the second. Twice in these chapters Paul sets a wage against a gift, and the Greek uses a different word for “wages” each time (Rom. 4:4; 6:23). The first time, he shuts work out of what God counts as righteousness. The second time, he puts it back in, for men who already belong to Him.

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It’s a slow walk, and that’s the point. Take it a section at a time with your own Bible open, and you’ll see what can’t be seen from the Road.