We have come to the end of Romans 12. As we look back over this remarkable chapter, starting with the offering of our bodies to God as living sacrifices and ending with the offering of ourselves and our own best efforts to others in order that, by the grace of God, we might overcome their evil with good, we marvel at the wisdom, scope and power of a Gospel that can do that. It is a Gospel that can take sinners who have lived only for themselves and turn them into men and women who actually overcome the evil of this world. Who could ever think up a Gospel like that? Not ourselves, for sure. Only God could devise such a powerful Gospel.
Here is how Robert Haldane describes it:
In the above remarkable portion of Scripture, we learn the true tendency of the doctrine of salvation wholly by grace, established in a manner so powerful in the preceding part of this epistle, by which men are created in Christ Jesus unto good works. How beautiful is it, and how sublime when displayed in all its practical effects in the duties which flow from it…. We may search all the works of the most admired writers and, so far as they have not borrowed from the fountain of inspired truth, we shall find in them nothing comparable to the elevated maxims contained in this chapter. Especially we shall not discover the faintest shadow of resemblance to the motives by which these duties are here inculcated. If the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth his handiworks—if the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that the heathen are without excuse—how much more clearly do the Scriptures proclaim their Divine origin, and the majesty of their Author! God hath magnified his word above his name.1
1Robert Haldane, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (MacDill AFB: MacDonald, 1958), 575.
