27 The Unveiling of God’s Secret (16:25-27)
Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen. (16:25–27)
The book of Romans ends with a beautiful doxology, praising God for what He has done through His Son, Jesus Christ.
Doxologies are found throughout Scripture. Sometimes a writer is so overwhelmed with gratitude that he breaks into inspired praise to God for His goodness and grace. That is especially evident in the Psalms, the hymnbook of ancient Israel. The 150 psalms are divided into five sections, generally referred to as books. Although praises to God are found throughout the Psalms, each of the five books ends with a special doxology. Book one ends with, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen, and Amen” (41:13). Except for the closing ascription to David (v. 20), book two ends with, “Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone works wonders. And blessed be His glorious name forever; and may the whole earth be filled with His glory. Amen, and Amen” (72:18–19). Book three ends with, “Blessed be the Lord forever! Amen and Amen” (89:52). Book four ends with, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting even to everlasting. And let all the people say, ‘Amen.’ Praise the Lord!” (106:48). Book five ends with Psalm 150, every verse of which is a grand doxology.
The New Testament is replete with doxologies. At the birth of Jesus, the angel and “a multitude of the heavenly host [were] praising God, saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest’” (Luke 2:13–14). When Christ made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, “the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the miracles which they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord; peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’” (Luke 19:37–38). The prayer that Jesus taught His disciples, commonly known as the Lord’s Prayer, ends with the doxology, “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen” (Matt. 6:13).
In the midst of this letter to the Roman church, Paul declares, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to Him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:33–36). Likewise in the middle of his letter to Ephesian believers, Paul interjects a doxology that often is used at the close of worship services: “Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Eph. 3:20–21).
Near the end of the letter to the Hebrews, the author proclaims, “Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (Heb. 13:20–21).
The book of Revelation is filled with hymns of praise. “The four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb … and they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy art Thou to take the book, and to break its seals; for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation’” (Rev. 5:8–9). They were joined by “the voice of many angels, … and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, saying, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing’” (vv. 11–12). Another great multitude in heaven sang, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God; because His judgments are true and righteous” (19:1–2).
There is a remarkable relationship between the last three verses of Romans and the first eleven. In 16:25 Paul speaks of Him who is able to establish you, and in 1:11 he talks of his readers being established. He speaks of my gospel, and in 1:1 of “the gospel of God.” He speaks of the mystery of God which has been kept secret for long ages past, and in 1:2 of the gospel “which He promised beforehand.” He mentions the preaching of Jesus Christ, and in 1:3 the gospel concerning God’s Son. He speaks of the Scriptures of the prophets, just as he does in 1:2. He speaks of the gospel being made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith, and in 1:5 of bringing “about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.”
Paul’s closing doxology in Romans is unique, in that, in his praise of the Lord, he recapitulates major themes of the epistle. Perhaps taking the pen from Tertius (see v. 22), the apostle touches on the gospel that establishes men (v. 25a), the gospel that proclaims Jesus Christ (v. 25b), and the gospel that reveals God’s mystery (vv. 25c-26).
THE GOSPEL THAT ESTABLISHES MEN
Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel (16:25a)
First of all, Paul praises God for the gospel that establishes men. God is able, that is, has sufficient power, to establish those who trust in Him according to the true gospel that Paul, and every true preacher and teacher, have clearly set forth.
Stērizō (to establish) means to make firm and stable, to make fast. In this context it refers to being mentally settled, firmly rooted in the truth of the gospel. The unbeliever has no certainty about God or His Word or the way of salvation. The majority of mankind does not even have an interest in finding the true God. They are perfectly satisfied with the religion they have inherited or been exposed to, or else have no concern about religion at all. Even those who attempt to find God by their own searching and discernment are “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).
But, through the gospel, God is able to establish the minds and hearts of believers in the truth, to settle us, ground us, and make us firm in Him. No one but a Christian can be certain about God, certain about His truth, certain about His standards of righteousness, certain about His love and care, or certain about being with Him throughout eternity. Only the genuinely converted can truthfully say with Paul, “I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day” (2 Tim. 1:12). The apostle assured the Corinthian Christians that “God is able to make all grace abound to you, that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed” (2 Cor. 9:8).
In praying for God to establish the believers at Ephesus, Paul petitioned the Lord “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:16–19).
In referring to my gospel, Paul was not speaking of his own personal view of the gospel. His gospel was the same as Peter’s gospel, John’s gospel, and the gospel preached by the other true apostles and teachers—the divinely-revealed gospel of Jesus Christ. As he explained to the Galatian believers, “I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11–12; cf. 2:2).
Through the gospel of Jesus Christ, whenever and by whomever it is rightly proclaimed, God will take a fallen, corrupted, vacillating, drifting, insecure, uncertain, chaotic mind and doomed soul and establish it forever in His truth by the power of His Spirit.
Many people try to squeeze out all the joy and meaning from life that they can, only to discover there is nothing there that satisfies. Life cannot have meaning apart from the Creator and Sustainer of life. Apart from Him, there is no purpose, no meaning, no satisfaction, no joy, no hope. There is only sin, disappointment, and judgment.
That is the theme of the first three chapters of Romans. Sinful man suppresses God’s “truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (1:18–19). In rejecting what light they had from God, they turned to gods of their own making, “and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures” (v. 23). The inevitable product of idolatry is immorality. “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity,” Paul continues, “that their bodies might be dishonored among them. … God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts” (vv. 24, 26–27). Along with homosexuality came “unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil,” and countless other forms of sin (vv. 28–30) that cause man to fall under the judgment of God.
In chapter 2 Paul says that God does not raise men up and establish them in righteousness because of His special favor for one group or person or another, “for there is no partiality with God” (v. 11). Nor does God forgive men because of ignorance, “for all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law; and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law” (v. 12). God does not forgive and establish men on the basis of ritual, “for he is not a Jew [a true child of God] who is one outwardly; neither is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God” (vv. 28–29).
In chapter 3 Paul asserts that “There is none righteous, not even one” (v. 10) and that “by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in [God’s] sight” (v. 20). As he earlier declared, only “the gospel … is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (1:16). In his beautiful and encouraging doxology, Jude reminds us that God “is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy” (Jude 24).
THE GOSPEL THAT PROCLAIMS JESUS CHRIST
and the preaching of Jesus Christ, (16:25b)
The only gospel of God that establishes men is the gospel that proclaims Jesus Christ. The major theme of Romans, like the major theme of all Scripture, is Jesus Christ. The preaching of Jesus Christ was Paul’s supreme life commitment. “We preach Christ crucified,” he said, “to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23–24). In his second letter to the church at Corinth, he testified, “We do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord. … For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:5–6). “Faith comes from hearing,” he explains in Romans, “and hearing by the word of Christ” (10:17).
In the second section of Romans (3:21–8:39), the apostle delineates virtually every blessing that the gospel brings to the lives of those who belong to Jesus Christ, those He has established. To give but a partial list: righteousness comes by faith in Christ (3:22); we are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (3:24); righteousness will be reckoned to “those who believe in Him [God] who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (4:24); “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1); “if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him” (6:8); “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:23); “we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter” (7:6); we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit (8:9), have life in the Spirit (8:11), are led by the Spirit (8:14), have the Spirit’s witness that we are God’s children (8:16); have the first fruits of the Spirit (8:23), are interceded for by the Spirit (8:26), and cannot be separated “from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).
THE GOSPEL THAT REVEALS GOD’S MYSTERY
according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith; to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be the glory forever. Amen. (16:25c-27)
The gospel that establishes us and that proclaims Jesus Christ also reveals God’s divine mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past.
This mystery (mustērion) does not carry the connotation that word has in modern English, as used, for example, of a mystery novel. In the New Testament it refers to something hidden in former times but now made known. Specifically, it refers to a part of God’s truth that was not revealed, or was only partially revealed, in the Old Testament.
In 1 Corinthians Paul uses the term in a general way, speaking of the apostles and New Testament prophets, such as himself, Apollos, and Peter, as “stewards of the mysteries of God” (4:1; cf. 3:22). That is, they are bringing new revelation hidden from ages past (cf. Eph. 3:9; Col. 1:25–26).
There are many mysteries, such as “the mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:7–8), “the mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16), the mystery of the rapture (1 Cor. 15:51), “the mystery of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4:11), “the mystery of His [Christ’s] will” (Eph. 1:9), the mystery of Christ (Col. 2:2; 4:3), the mystery of Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32), “the mystery of the gospel” (Eph. 6:19), the mystery of Christ in believers (Col. 1:27), “the mystery of the faith” (1 Tim. 3:9), and several other mysteries mentioned in the book of Revelation (1:20; 10:7; 17:5, 7). But the most common mystery spoken of in the New Testament relates to God’s providing salvation for Gentiles as well as Jews. Speaking of the divine truth revealed to him as an apostle, Paul wrote, “By revelation there was made known to me the mystery, as I wrote before in brief. And by referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit” (Eph. 3:3–5). Specifically, the mystery is “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (v. 6; cf. v. 9). In other words, God’s ultimate plan of redemption has always included the Gentiles in every way as much as the Jews, His specially chosen people under the Old Covenant. Through Jesus Christ, believing Gentiles are as fully saved, as fully the children of God, and as fully citizens of His divine kingdom as are believing Jews.
The mystery that now is manifested had been predicted in veiled words by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, [and] has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith. Through Isaiah, God promised that “the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11). Jeremiah foretold, “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. … I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people” (Jer. 31:31, 33). Through Ezekiel, the Lord said, “I shall give them one heart, and shall put a new spirit within them. And I shall take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 11:19).
Jews had always thought that such predictions, whatever they may fully have meant, applied only to them, the chosen race of God. “As to this salvation,” Peter explains, “the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow” (1 Pet. 1:10–11). Even to God’s inspired prophets under the Old Covenant, the full meaning of their prophecies was a mystery.
Yet, when God first made His covenant with Abraham, the father of His chosen people Israel, He alluded to His offering of grace to the whole world. “In you,” He told Abraham, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). When God made the covenant with His people through Moses at Mt. Sinai, He said, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). In other words, it was God’s design that Israel, as a nation, was to be a priest, a mediator of God, for the rest of the world.
Through Isaiah, the Lord told Israel that He not only had called her in righteousness and would hold her by the hand and watch over her, but also that He would appoint her “as a covenant to the people, as a light to the nations” (Isa. 42:6; cf. 49:22; 54:3; 60:5; 62:2; 66:19). Speaking of the Messiah, God predicted, “I will also make You a light of the nations so that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6), a passage that Paul and Barnabas quoted before a crowd of both Gentiles and Jews in Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:46–47).
That is the truth Paul emphasizes in the third major section of Romans (chaps. 9–16). God made “known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, … not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As He says also in Hosea, ‘I will call those who were not My people, “My people,” and her who was not beloved, “beloved”’ (9:23–25). “For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all” (10:11–12). Paul spoke specifically of “the mystery … that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in” (11:25, emphasis added), that is, until the Gentiles have had full opportunity to hear and receive the gospel.
In 12:3–8 Paul commands all believers, both Jews and Gentiles, to minister to each other with the gifts the Holy Spirit has given them. In chapter 13 he focuses on the responsibility of all believers to respect governmental authorities and to behave properly before the world. In chapter 14 he emphasizes the responsibility of believers not to offend one another’s consciences, and in chapter 15 he reminds his readers again of God’s extension of saving grace to both Jew and Gentile. In chapter 16, Paul’s greeting Jews and Gentiles alike reflects his personal conviction of their oneness in Jesus Christ.
Paul crowns this marvelous letter with praise to the only wise God, the God of Jews and of Gentiles, the God of all creation. One may wonder why he does not say, “to the only powerful” or “only loving” or “only gracious” God. He has much to say about those divine attributes in his letters, including this one. Perhaps he calls attention here to God’s wisdom in order to emphasize that only an infinitely wise mind could have designed and accomplished such a plan of redemption.
In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul testified, “To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things; in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:8–11, emphasis added).
It was through Jesus Christ that God supremely revealed not only His great grace but also His great wisdom. To Him, therefore, be the glory forever. Amen.