I’ve been thinking some more about this.  Here is a result:

romans 4.18-5.5 chiasm

What did the Roman Christians think when Paul told them he was under obligation to foolish Barbarians?

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you— that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I want you to know, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.

Paul spends much of Romans condemning Jewish boasting in their election and then warning the Roman Christians from committing the same sin against Israel (Romans 11).  But what were Roman attitudes about Spain?

Romans is supposed to be about the salvation that God has brought about in Jesus.  Jesus died in our place, for our sins, so that his righteousness can be imputed to us.

But then Jesus could have come in any era at any time and died somehow and thus made atonement.

Atonement doesn’t work that way.

Jesus, Paul says, died “at the right time” (Romans 5.6).  The transaction required more than a savior.  It required a great deal of sin.  It required a trespass (or many of them) for God to condemn.

So Romans is filled with (1) descriptions of how God made sin worse using the Law and (2) defenses of God’s character for using evil in this way.

So Paul keeps coming back to this:

“For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their [Israel’s] disobedience…” (Romans 11.30)

“And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification” (Romans 5.16).

“Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5.20)

Now if their transgression be riches for the world and their failure be riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be! (Romans 11.12).

For if their rejection be the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? (Romans 11.15).

Romans 3.1-8 makes the same point, with some apologetics thrown in.

And Romans 5 establishes that the Law was given in order to produce the many trespasses.

And all of this was necessary to produce Judgment Day, the moment when the sky would turn back and the wrath of God would fall.

On Jesus.

“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8.3, 4).

It is important to remember that the majority of the sacrificial system was not an ad hoc means for individuals to deal with sins when they wanted to do so.  It involved a series of sacrifices, morning and evening, and then on special days, climaxing in the Day of Atonement.  Paul gives two things that God did.  1) He sent his son in the likeness of sinful flesh; and 2) he sent him as a sin offering (“concerning sin”).  The obedience of the Second Adam only works with the many trespasses (Romans 5).

When God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus, this was not simply a mental “act” on God’s part.  It was public; it is recorded in all the Gospels.

Here’s something I wrote a few years ago:

Let us suppose that the record in the Gospels of Israel’s large-scale apostasy is not an accident that just happened to be the case, but rather an essential element of Christ’s atonement.

Honestly now, given the way we usually articulate the Gospel [1.], it seems to me that Jesus could have been born and Irishman, an Iraqi, or a Chinaman, and could have died in any number of ways, to complete his mission to die for the elect. But this leaves us with some problems. A minor one is in apologetics. The whole scheme seems fantastically arbitrary to many.

There is a more substantial problem for believers that I will break down into two related ones: First, it renders ninety-nine percent of the information given to us in the four Gospels actually superfluous to the message of the Gospel. Second, it leaves us with no explanation as to the entire history of Israel recorded in the Scriptures.

Let me put it this way: Why did God wait thousands of years and spend so much time working with the nation of Israel? What was the point? To give us moral lessons? That doesn’t make much sense. Why not simply choose Abraham and Sarah to give birth to the Christ child?

Let’s assume that history in Scripture matters. What is the Biblical history? I’ll summarize in three stages:

1. From Adam to Noah the world grows in evil until God has to destroy it.
2. From Noah to Moses the world grows in evil. After the nations are formed in the shadow of the ruins of Babel, Abraham is chosen to bring salvation to the nations. But we find Jacob’s sons are about to mix up with the Canaanites (the point of the story of Judah and Tamar). God curses the world with famine but provides a savior in Joseph from the famine and in Egypt from the intermarriage of the chosen people, since the Hebrews were abominable to the Egyptians. Nevertheless, in Egypt they fall into idolatry and become slaves.
3. From Moses to Jesus. Three times the covenant unravels. The decline found in the book of Judges is corrected through Samuel and David. The decline under the kings is corrected through exile. But Jesus came to a nation worse than it had ever been. The demons alone, prove this. There is no precedent in the Hebrew Scriptures for widespread demonic oppression.

Thus, my hypothesis: God was about to destroy the world.

Israel was given the law and they had only become worse sinners as a result. To whom much is given much is required. And if Israel was under judgment–they whom God had given the task of being a light to the nations–then the rest of the world was surely doomed as well. The wrath of God was about to fall.

And Jesus stepped in its path.

He came at the right time just when the priestly people who had been given the covenant law had become the worst offenders. He literally came on Judgment Day. And the only reason there is a world of human beings today is because that judgment fell on him instead of the ones who deserved it.

A lot more could be said. My suggestion, for lack of time right now, is to read Paul as one who thinks the world, in principle, has been destroyed and then reborn. For what it’s worth, I have a couple of other suggestions about how this reading makes more sense of Romans as a whole.

Everything seems to confirm this approach and make everything fall into place.  But if so, then Romans 9.6ff is the essential climax to the argument.  Paul begins to deal with the issue in Romans 3.1-8 and then sets up more background to start dealing with it fully in Romans 9.

Abraham described in Romans 4.19-21:

He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.

The power of God is emphasized at the start of Romans relating to the resurrection of Jesus (1.4).  The power and the glory, in contrast with weakness and shame show up in interesting places in Romans.  Here, I’ve emphasized to words both rooted in “power” (dynamos).  Though Abraham is weak, his faith is strong.  How can that be?  It seems faith is measured by the object of faith, not the strength of the believer.  God is omnipotent so no weakness in or around Abraham can make him weaken in faith.

(If “waver” sound related, that is somewhat illusionary.  I’m still trying to figure out what the translators are doing 1n 1.20)

Is Romans 7.7ff simply Paul’s personal experience battling with sin either as an unregenerate person or a believer?

Or is it really about something different?

The idea that Romans 7 represents the struggle of corporate Israel after Sinai and before Pentecost seems ridiculous unless one makes some kind of existential leap of faith.  Otherwise, it is simply laughable.

Why am I not laughing any more?

Because Paul started talking that way, not in Romans 7.7ff, but in Romans 2:

Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.

But it is simply not true that ever Jew has done those very same things.  Nor does Paul ever bother to offer an argument that any sins whatsoever counts as the same.  He accuses Jewish judges of hypocrisy because they know their nation is no better off.  One finds in Acts that Jews are publicly associated with magic and the occult.  Paul was able to write confidently that everyone knew the Jewish nation both in Israel and in the rest of the empire was overrun with sin.

But not every individual was doing this.  It didn’t matter.  Like Daniel (ch 9) was ashamed of his nation’s sin and confessed it, so no believing Jew was in a position to claim that God’s covenant with Israel was provoking any less wrath from God than the Gentile behavior.

The “Man” in Romans 2.1 is corporate Israel.  So is the “I” in Romans 7.7.

Or so I think at this point.

Zephaniah 3.15:

YHWH has taken away the judgments against you;
he has cleared away your enemies.
The King of Israel, YHWH, is in your midst;
you shall never again fear evil.

Peter Leithart has some excellent commentary on this verse, but I am surprised he doesn’t tie in Romans and the inclusion of the Gentiles.  For example, from Romans 10:

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Worldwide Lord (both Jews and Gentiles) = world wide justification for all who believe.

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

“That you may be justified in your words,
and prevail when you are judged.”

But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) By no means! For then how could God judge the world? But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

The issue here is not simply that God gave a good command and it resulted in sin.  “Why not do evil that good may come?”  God entrusted Israel to do a task and promised to bring about a result through Israel.  But he proved faithful in bringing about this good result through Israel’s unfaithfulness.

Israel broke covenant with God and thereby were instrumental in bringing about the New Covenant that was promised.  No wonder people would mock Paul’s Gospel, saying, “Why not do evil that good may come?”

Wright notices in his lecture C1 of his “Romans in a Week” seminar, that Paul uses the same word for Christian behavior (“we boast”) that he condemns in chapters 2 and 3 or Romans regarding “boasting” in the Law.  He expresses a wish for an English word that could be used in all cases but that worked better than “boasting.”

We need a word which will say, “This is our ground of confidence. This is the place on which we stand secure.” Because, of course, the whole point about the Christian security [i.e. as opposed to those who “boast in the Law”], the “boast” of 5.1-11, is that it is not a boast in oneself. It is not a boast in one’s ethnicity or pride of attainment of whatever sort. It is simply a looking at what God has done in Christ.

Pretty devious for the pre-eminent author of works-righteousness in our time to teach such stuff.  Because, we know that the entire Reformed guardian class cannot possibly be either stupid or driven by jealousy to be mis-characterizing Wright’s teaching so drastically.  This must be a feint.

“I am not ashamed of the Gospel for… it is not as though the Word of God has failed.”