The Scripture is not a string of stories, poems and genealogies arranged like beads on a necklace. Rather, it tells a single story with each “book” serving as chapters related to each other and contributing a necessary element to the meta-narrative of the whole Scripture. This is indicated in Romans (and many of Paul’s other letters) by Paul’s use of quotations from many other books of the Old Testament. His letter to the Roman Christians plays a necessary part in the sweeping story of the Scripture.
That story is as follows:
Creation
“In the beginning God“. So begins the story. He speaks and things come into existence: “God said, ‘Let there be light’ and light was” (literal translation). And so on until everything in creation “is”. Creation culminated with God’s making men and women in his image in as sub-lords under his own Lordship over all he has made. He loves them and wants them to love him. Love is not coerced or instinctual, however. Love has to be chosen; it must be freely given. In order to allow them to choose love for him, God gave them a command with a consequence for breaking it: they are not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for on the day they eat of it, they will die.
In those days it was very good.
Fall
Satan, one of God’s angels who had sinned in the pre-Adam and Eve era, approached them and said that God, in fact, was not loving and could not be trusted. He had, Satan said, essentially lied to them, that having eaten the fruit Adam and Eve would find themselves being like God, something God, in his selfish nature, could not permit. Eve trusted the serpent, Satan, instead of God, so she and her husband ate the fruit. Immediately they knew they had done wrong. The knowledge they had gained was not life-giving or good but wicked. Sure enough, God expelled them from the garden of Eden and into the realm of death where they would eventually die.
Sin
In this land of death sin exploded, spreading through humanity like a cancer, so that by the time of Noah it was true of humankind that “every intention of the facts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen 6:4). God judged humanity with a flood, saving only Noah and his family. After the flood, though, Noah himself sinned and sin spread, through his children, to all mankind.
Centuries later God chose a man, Abraham, out of this humanity to be the forefather of a nation of people – Israel – through whom he would make himself known and provide a blessing to the world.
Again, centuries later, God would formalize through a covenant that he would be Israel’s God. Israel, too, made a covenant with God, that they would be a faithful and obedient nation living under God’s good Lordship.
This covenant they repeatedly broke. The remainder of the Old Testament details their willful departure from that promise. God judged them again, not with a flood but this time with exile. A very small minority returned but they too rejected their relationship to God.
Christ
None of this surprised God, however. Since “before the creation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4) he had devised a rescue plan centred in his own son, Jesus the Christ. Jesus came to earth born as a human. As an adult he began to reverse the effects of sin itself by teaching, healing, showing his sovereignty over creation, and even raising at least three people from death.
He allowed himself to be killed as a sacrifice for human sin, his infinite divine life given for humanity’s infinite debt of sin. No one else in history had the infinite resources to accomplish this. Only God could, and looking back Jesus’ disciples could see that he was, in fact, divine.
His status as God’s son was established by his resurrection. At his ascension into heaven he told his followers to proclaim forgiveness through his death and resurrection, which they did.
The church
Empowered by the Holy Spirit the news of Jesus and God’s divine forgiveness spread, first in Jerusalem where Christ had been dead and resurrected, and then across the world.
At first the Jews, who had first received of the promise originally given to Abraham, thought the promise was theirs perpetually. But several of them recognized that God’s concern was not only for Israel but for the world and started preaching the word to the Gentiles.
This activity is still going on today.
Eternity
When the church age shall end and Christ shall come again from heaven and quash evil for good, there will be no sin, death, or sickness any more. Satan, his cohorts and all the people who refused to live under the Lordship of God, made possible again through the forgiveness procured through Christ, will be consigned to eternal death.
The “righteous”, that is, those who accepted Christ as Saviour and Lord and therefore had his righteousness imputed to them, will live eternity with God just as Adam and Eve did back at the beginning.
But this time people who had experienced the knowledge of good and evil, but have been forgiven through Christ, were enabled to once again love God. God and humanity were reconciled forever.
This is Scripture’s meta-narrative, the grand story of the Bible.
The place of Romans
The letter to the Romans belongs in the Church age, in the apostolic period between the ascension of Christ and the close of the New Testament era. More specifically it can be placed firmly in the period in the post-Antioch years through Paul’s arrest, and most probably from Corinth (compare Rom. 16:1 and Acts 18:18), just before his trip to Jerusalem with a financial gift for the Christians there to be followed by a trip to Rome. In this period some of the Jews, God’s chosen people in the Old Testament, felt like they still had some ascendancy over the Gentiles.
In this letter Paul addresses the Jews and demonstrates that the very things they thought indicated their privileged treatment actually argued for the gospel being for the whole world as equals, not at a higher level for them as Jews. After a brief word to the Gentiles he outlines how they are to live not as two camps but as one united people.
Some other letters (Galatians and Ephesians especially) deal with the same issue, that Jews and Gentiles together form one people of God.
The unique place of Romans in Scripture is that in it Paul most clearly states and argues for, using logic and the Old Testament, the fundamental unity of God’s people in Christ (especially between Jews and Gentiles). Again, he addresses the Jews (whereas Ephesians he addresses the Gentiles) and is more reasoned out than Galatians which is somewhat reactive.
This letter is addressed to the church in the capital of the empire which symbolizes to ‘ends of the earth’ spoken of by Jesus at his ascension.