‘Those he justified, he also glorified.’ Paul knew Isaiah like the back of his hand. When he alludes to it as obviously as this, he must intend his readers to hear what he says in the same vein. God called Israel for a purpose; and in the Messiah and by the spirit he has fulfilled and is fulfilling that purpose. Just like the phrase ‘those who love God’, this clause is an Israel-designation; and in Isaiah, as in the scriptures more generally, Israel is called into being by YHWH for the larger purposes already indicated in the promises to Abraham. Israel is to be the means of bringing God’s rescue operation to humans and to the whole creation.

  Some have objected to this idea. God, some will say, loves us just because he loves us, not because he wants to use us for a purpose. But biblically speaking that’s a false either/or. God’s loving purpose for Israel always involved God’s loving purpose through Israel. Paul’s own awareness that the son of God ‘loved me and gave himself for me’ is fully at one with Paul’s equal awareness that God had called him to be the apostle to the nations; to be, in fact, the one who would make the Servant-vocation of Isaiah 40—55 a reality. Think again of Galatians 1.16: what happened on the road to Damascus was that God was revealing himself not just to Paul but in Paul – with the purpose that he might proclaim him among the nations. There has been quite a debate in the last generation as to whether Paul was ‘converted’ or ‘called’ – a debate fuelled not least by Jewish scholars who have wanted to stress that Paul did not, as it were, change from one religion to another. That is absolutely fair enough. Paul’s own testimony was that he had always worshipped the one God of Israel, and what had changed was not that primary allegiance but his recognition that the crucified and risen Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. The real change of meaning we need to consider is that, while so many Christian readers have seen the Damascus road as the moment when Paul was ‘saved’, Paul saw it primarily as the moment when he was sent.5

  There is another possible objection. Surely, someone might say, ‘the Servant’ is Jesus himself, not his people? Well, Paul draws on the Servant-songs in various places, not just to talk about Jesus, but to speak both of himself as the apostle to the gentiles and (as we shall see in verses 31–9) of the whole renewed, messianically shaped people of God. Paul clearly sees a fluidity between the Servant-Messiah and his people which modern western logic finds hard to grasp. Indeed, once you see the Servant-shaped theme of verses 18 to 27, and then the explicit evocation of the Servant in verses 32 to 35, we have a strong contextual argument for reading verses 28 to 30, held between those two passages, in the same Isaianic terms. This is about the call of God’s people to be the ones through whom God reveals his glory to the world.

  The upshot of verse 28, then, exactly in line with what we’ve seen in verses 18 to 27, is to do with God’s overall purpose when he calls people to believe the gospel and follow Jesus. God’s loving call of Jesus’ followers, Jew and gentile alike, was not aimed at helping them to escape this world and go and live with him somewhere else. The purpose was so that, in rescuing them from sin and death, God would manifest his glory through them, not least through their suffering and prayer. God’s purposes are going ahead, and he recruits – that is, he calls – human beings to share in those purposes, as Genesis 1 always indicated he would do.

  This is where Paul’s theme of assurance comes into its own. We need to think of the little Roman house-churches, squashed into someone’s tenement attic or the small room behind a shop, anxious about other Jesus-followers in town who do some key things differently, fearful of the all-pervasive and socially coercive paganism, particularly the Caesar-worship that’s become all the rage. At this point in Rome, a city of around a million people, there were perhaps a couple of hundred Jesus-followers. They were a tiny micro-minority. But already they were known as trouble-makers, as a dangerous, subversive, disruptive little clique. And Paul’s doctrine of assurance was not simply that they would go to heaven when they died – though of course he believed that at death they would be ‘with the Messiah’, and that the spirit would then give them new bodily life in the final resurrection. His doctrine of assurance was to confirm that they, the Jesus-believing messianic people, were in fact the true people of the creator God, and that God was being glorified and would be glorified through their suffering and prayerful witness, even in the present time.

  So here, as earlier, Paul is cashing out a bit more what he had said in 5.17, a verse often ignored. There he insists that those who receive the gift of dikaiosynē, God’s covenant justice, or ‘righteousness’ in the old parlance, will reign in life. The NRSV translates 5.17 in terms of those who receive God’s gift of righteousness ‘exercising dominion’. That somewhat heavy phrase translates the Greek basileusousin, from the noun basileus which means ‘king’. What’s being promised is royal authority – which of course, as always in the New Testament, means royal authority as redefined by and around Jesus.6

  Of course, ruling or reigning on earth sounds a bit strange from the point of view of western theology, especially in the context of modern liberal democracy. We are trained implicitly to reject the idea of ‘religious’ people bossing everyone else around! But the idea of ruling or reigning makes perfect sense in first-century Jewish kingdom-of-God thinking. The Qumran sect believed that they would inherit ‘all the glory of Adam’; in other words, when the great day dawned they would be running the whole world. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6.3 that the Jesus-believers would one day have the task of judging angels! The book of Revelation says similar things: the slaughtered lamb has rescued people so that they can be the ‘royal priesthood’, reigning (the same word, basileusousin) on earth. What does this all mean? What happens when we release Paul from the burden of trying to address sixteenth-century issues and let him speak into his own time – and, through that, into ours as well?

  Part of our problem is that those who thought they spoke and acted for God in the sixteenth century, as in many other centuries, tried to implement that vocation in the usual worldly way, by force of arms. But, as Jesus insisted, God’s kingdom goes forwards in the ways set out in the Sermon on the Mount, in peacemaking, in justice-bringing, in mourning over the world’s ills, in meekness, purity of heart and so on. That’s what ‘ruling’ looks like now. And it begins, in the present time, with the inarticulate and anguished prayer that Paul describes in Romans 8.26–7 – the prayer of those who are indwelt by the spirit, caught up in the love of God for his suffering world.

  Thus Paul is assuring the Messiah-followers in Rome that they are in fact the people through whom the creator God will work out his purposes of new creation, and through whom this God is already working them out. How easy it was, some centuries later, for some in the church to imagine that this meant Jesus’ followers holding ordinary worldly power, and for others to react by pushing the whole thing away to a distant ‘heaven’. But the abuse doesn’t take away the use. From the Sermon on the Mount onwards, Jesus’ promises that the meek would inherit the earth, that the poor in spirit would inherit God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, meant what they said. Romans 8 is one of the most vivid applications of the same point. God is working all things for good with and through those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

  Of course, it doesn’t look like that on the ground. What Jesus’ followers mostly see is danger, suffering, wordless lament, tragic disunity. Paul is assuring them, and us, that God’s purpose is going ahead precisely through this faithful and prayerful, if frequently uncomprehending, witness. Rescuing Romans 8.28 from the normal misunderstandings opens up the possibility of a whole new view of the church’s present vocation.

  Paul explains this in verse 29 through an explosive christological statement. God knew in advance, that is, he ‘foreknew’, the people he was going to shape so he could work through them in this way. This is a prophetic call, like God saying to Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and . . . I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’ Paul alludes to that in Galatians 1 when describing his own ‘call’.7 Scripture speaks, in Amos and Hosea and elsewhere, of God having ‘known’ Israel from of old.8 And this goes closely with Paul’s next verb, prohōrisen, ‘marked out in advance’, referring to God sketching, ahead of time, how his purposes were to be worked out.

  So this is not about ‘predestination to salvation’ – or indeed its opposite. Subsequent theological traditions have invented puzzles of which the first Christians were innocent. Paul is speaking, as Isaiah was speaking, of God’s purposes to reveal his name and glory to the whole world. He uses similar language, to the same effect, in the great paean of praise in Ephesians 1, the purpose being that God’s glory would be displayed before the watching and often hostile world. That is precisely the point made over and over again in Isaiah 40—55. Here in verse 29, the Messiah’s people are to display before the world the truth which is in Jesus himself. They are – we are – to be ‘conformed to the image of his son’, or as I’ve translated it to bring out the flavour of symmorphous tēs eikonos, ‘shaped according to the model’ of his son.

  This language at once conjures up the larger image-of-God theology which we find when Paul draws on Genesis 1, Psalm 8 and other passages, for instance in 2 Corinthians 4.4–6 or Colossians 1.15–20. As we have seen when looking at the ‘sending of the son’ in Romans 8.3, this carries the overtones of Davidic Messiahship. But now the Davidic promises have been democratized, as promised in Isaiah 55.3. The spirit has worked in people’s hearts through the gospel, so that the unique role marked out in scripture for the king is now shared, again as foreseen in scripture, with all his people.

  So, says Paul, Jesus is to be the ‘firstborn among many brothers’, the senior member of a larger family. In Exodus 4.22, Israel is God’s firstborn. In Psalm 89.27, it’s the Messiah who is the firstborn. In Colossians 1.18, it is Jesus himself. In other words, the spirit is given so that Jesus-believers may become Jesus-lookalikes, sharing his status as the people who inherit the promises; and the people doing the ‘looking’ are the hostile and puzzled unbelieving world. With this dense christological phrase, Paul is alluding, as in chapter 5 or Philippians 3.19–21, to Jesus both as Messiah and as the true Adam, echoing Psalm 8 where the ‘image-bearing’ vocation of Genesis 1 is cashed out in relation to the intended universal sovereignty of human beings over God’s world. Jesus, the true human, is ruling the world in glory. His followers are called to be Jesus-reflectors in the world. And, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3.18, this means already being ‘changed from glory to glory’. Glory does not mean ‘going to heaven and shining like a light bulb’. It means regaining the proper human vocation and dignity, under God and over the world – a vocation and dignity now made possible by the indwelling of the spirit, like the divine presence in the Temple. Or even, we should say, as the divine presence in the Temple.

  This brings us back to themes we have already mentioned. In this verse, Paul squashes together into one dense little sentence the deeply biblical idea that God from the beginning made his world in such a way that it would work as designed, moving towards its intended goal, through obedient humans. Christology is already implicit in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8. The biblical echoes of what Paul now says point to the belief that this God, having seen idolatry and injustice displace worship and stewardship, created his rescue project – the call of Abraham and his family to be the Servant-people through whom his glory would be displayed in all the world – in such a way that this, too, would be fulfilled through the ultimate obedient human. That is precisely what Paul says, albeit with tantalizing brevity, in Romans 5.

  So now Paul sees God’s earlier human-shaped and Messiah-shaped project focusing with laser-like precision on Jesus, Israel’s representative Messiah. Paul already knows him to be the ‘son of God’ in the double sense, not just of Israel’s king, the coming Messiah, but of the one sent from God, embodying (as we have seen already) both God’s purpose for Israel and God’s purpose for his own self. Paul does not here explain this amazing Christology. But if we are to feel the force of what he is summarizing, we need this combination of themes in mind.

  Paul is here looking back, of course, to 8.3–4, where God sent the son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin-offering. He is also echoing the letter’s opening statement in 1.3–4. There he gives his initial definition of the gospel: the message about God’s son (this letter is going to Rome, which already had a ‘gospel’ about a ‘son of God’), the one descended from the seed of David according to the flesh and now marked out, publicly declared, as ‘son of God’ in power through his resurrection. In 1.4 the word Paul uses for his being ‘marked out’ is horisthentos, which is cognate with the prohorizō, ‘marked out in advance’, which he uses here in verse 29. Jesus’ people are now marked out in their baptism (6.1–14) as ‘resurrection-people’, in advance of this becoming publicly visible. Their calling is to be like him, to share his sonship, his inheritance, his suffering, his glory. All this is already true of them. This is the basis of their present vocation. That is what this whole section of the chapter (verses 12–30) is all about.

  This christological frame – the focus on Jesus as God’s Messiah, and then the shaping of his people to be like him – holds the first eight chapters of Romans firmly together. Paul’s argument is emphatically messianic, emphatically in that sense political, having to do with the present world and not just a distant heaven. It is emphatically a call to ‘the obedience of faith’. It is, clearly and strongly, a call to be part of a new version of the human race itself, a company to whose coming rule the whole world is to be subject, a rule whose present manifestation, in paradoxical glory, would be, like the manifestation of Jesus himself, one of self-giving love, seen here in the spirit-filled work of lament and intercession. Suffering and glory, etched in the portraits of Jesus which four of Paul’s contemporaries were to write, was already marking out the lookalike Messiah-people who were conformed to the image of the son, as they found themselves called to live within his extended family and to display the family likeness to the world.

  As the letter moves forwards from here, Paul continues to shape it christologically. He gives a fresh summary statement, pointing to the particular argument he’s going to put forward in chapters 9—11, at 9.5. He gives another summary, looking ahead to chapters 12—16 as a whole, at 12.5. The letter’s real finale in 15.12, making a full circle with 1.1–5, has Paul quoting Isaiah 11.10, about the root of Jesse who rises to rule the nations, echoing the great chapter in which the Davidic Messiah presides over a world where the wolf lies down with the lamb with a little child leading them.9 When we look back across Romans with that amazing sweep of messianic thought – the gospel, the cross, the Messiah, the one body in the Messiah, and then the risen Messiah ruling God’s world – it is remarkable to realize how Paul has distilled all of that down into a single powerful, pregnant phrase here in verse 29. We who believe, we who love God, have been marked out to be shaped according to this pattern, this messianic reality, this glory-revealing family. The more the world objects, mocks and threatens, the more it becomes apparent that the message is getting through. And that will take us into the last nine verses of the chapter.

  But for the moment we are left with the great hammer-blows of verse 30. I have often likened these to the crashing chords at the end of Sibelius’s fifth symphony.

  Hous de prohōrisen, toutous kai ekalesen; kai hous ekalesen, toutous kai edikaiōsen; hous de edikaiōsen, toutous kai edoxasen.

  Those he marked out, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

  This, the summing up of the whole letter so far – more especially of chapters 5—8, and more particularly still of 8.12 onwards! – has the strong feel of a QED, celebrating the divine sovereignty that undergirds Paul’s thought in general and Romans in particular. There is, it appears, no stopping this God. Those who believe, having responded in faith to the ‘call’ which turns out to have been planned by God long ago, are declared to be ‘in the right’. That does not simply mean that their sins are forgiven for ever, though they are. It means that they can hold their heads up, now in their rat-ridden apartments on the wrong side of Rome’s polluted River Tiber, or in the slaves’ quarters at the back of some great house, or camping out in a ditch somewhere, having been kicked out of a home or town. They can be assured that they are the true people of the one creator God; that this God is working his purposes out, that one day at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. And as the spirit bears witness with their spirit that they are God’s children, as the spirit groans within their own groaning, longing for their full adoption in the coming resurrection, they are summoned, as are we ourselves, to faithful patience.

  I have suggested that this short passage, verses 28–30, is basically Servant-theology, focused on Jesus and then opening up to include all his people. Up to now in chapter 8, we have seen the mystery in which suffering seems to be not only something God’s people will have to go through but something as a result of which God’s purposes will come to birth. Of all the biblical roots for such an idea, Isaiah 40—55 stands out, not least because that’s where Paul will go explicitly in verses 32 to 35. And, at the heart of our present passage, he speaks of being conformed to the image of the son, the representative of God’s people, firstborn of a large family. All this says to me that Paul is thinking here of Isaiah 40—55, and especially the Servant-songs upon which he based his amazing Jesus-poem, likewise replete with Adamic references, in Philippians 2. That is why I am encouraged to read this otherwise difficult passage in the light of Isaiah, and to see the language that has commonly been taken to refer to ‘predestination to salvation’, generating well-known puzzles from Augustine to Calvin and beyond, in terms instead of the purposes of God through his people for the world. ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’

 

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