THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE EPISTLE
Most, if not all, of the great revivals and reformations in the history of the church have been directly related to the book of Romans.
In September A.D. 386, a native of North Africa who had been a professor for several years in Milan, Italy, sat weeping in the garden of his friend Alypius, contemplating the wickedness of his life.
While sitting there, he heard a child singing, “Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege” which in Latin means “Take up and read. Take up and read.” An open scroll of the book of Romans lay beside him, and he picked it up.
The first passage that caught his eye read, “Not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts” (13:13–14). The man later wrote of that occasion:
“No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended,—by a light, as it were, or security infused into my heart,—all the gloom of doubt vanished away” (Confessions Book 8, Chapter 12).
The man was Aurelius Augustine, who, upon reading that short passage from Romans, received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and went on to become one of the church’s outstanding theologians and leaders.
Just over a thousand years later, Martin Luther, a monk in the Roman Catholic order named after Augustine, was teaching the book of Romans to his students at the University of Wittenberg, Germany.
As he carefully studied the text, he became more and more convicted by Paul’s central theme of justification by faith alone. He wrote,
I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the righteousness of God,” because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and deals righteously in punishing the unrighteous....
Night and day I pondered until ... I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.
The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before “the righteousness of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love.
This passage of Paul became to me a gateway to heaven. (Cf. Barend Klaas Kuiper, Martin Luther: The Formative Years [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1933], pp. 198–208.)
