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`Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing hymns to your Name.'
Again, it says,
`Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people'.
And again,
`Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and sing praises to Him, all you peoples'.
And again, Isaiah says,
`The Root of Jesse will spring up,
One Who will arise to rule over the nations;
the Gentiles will hope in Him'.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you
may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (15: 5-13, N.I.V.).
No.24.
15: 14 - 33.
pp. 86 - 90
In Rom. 14: the apostle dealt with problems concerning food and religious days that
had to be faced by the early churches. For the most part these problems do not exist
today, although some may have a difficulty regarding days. It seems quite certain that
the regulations concerning the Jewish sabbath, the seventh day of the week, could not
have existed then, otherwise Paul could not have written Rom. 14: 5, 6 or Col.ii.15-17.
It will be helpful to quote Dean Alford here. Regarding the observance of days, he says:
"He (Paul) classes the observance or non-observance of particular days, with the
eating or abstaining from particular meats. In both cases he is concerned with things
which he evidently treats as of absolute indifference in themselves. Now the question is,
supposing the divine obligation of one day in seven to have been recognized by him in
any form, could he have thus spoken? The obvious inference from his strain of arguing
is, that he knew of no such obligation, but believed that all times and days to be, to the
Christian strong in faith, ALIKE. I do not see how the passage can be otherwise
understood. If any one day in the week were invested with the sacred character of the
Sabbath, it would have been wholly impossible for the Apostle to commend or uphold the
man who judged all days worthy of equal honour,--who, as in verse 6, paid no regard to
the (any) day. He must have visited him with his strongest disapprobation, as violating a
command of God. I therefore infer, that sabbatical obligation to keep any day, whether
seventh or first, was not recognized in apostolic times" (The Greek Testament, p.452).
We must surely distinguish the commands of God contained in the Scriptures from the
institutions of Christian men, and realize that the first day of the week is always so
designated in the N.T. and never called the Sabbath.
It is also essential to recognize the pre-eminence of Israel in Romans. "To the Jew
first" is written all over it. While, from the standpoint of sin, there was no difference
between Jew and Gentile, yet from the standpoint of the earthly phase of God's kingdom
purpose, Israel is pre-eminent as the Scriptures make abundantly clear, for it was through
the posterity of Abraham that all families of the earth were to be finally blessed (Gen.12:)
and Paul does not depart from this, as chapters 9:-11: show, as also does the present