Mercies Of God

Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Twelve
THE MERCIES OF GOD

Scripture Reading: verses 1-2 (Darby translation)

I BESEECH YOU THEREFORE, BRETHREN, BY THE COMPASSION OF GOD, TO PRESENT YOUR BODIES A LIVING SACRIFICE, HOLY, ACCEPTABLE TO GOD, [WHICH IS] YOUR INTELLIGENT SERVICE. AND BE NOT CONFORMED TO THIS WORLD, BUT BE TRANSFORMED BY THE RENEWING OF [YOUR] MIND, THAT YE MAY PROVE WHAT [IS] THE GOOD AND ACCEPTABLE AND PERFECT WILL OF GOD.

The twelfth chapter of Romans is a practical conclusion to the preceding chapters. Paul is beseeching his brethren by the compassion of God. This compassion is outlined for us in the first eleven chapters, showing the varied magnanimous ways in which the love of God has been made manifest. We must come back to the court room scene in order to catch the significance of it. Paul still stands as the brilliant attorney in this court drama, wherein the sinner, Jew or Gentile, has been pardoned and God, who is the Judge upon the bench, has been transformed for him into a loving and gracious Savior. In effect, God’s compassion has reached down to find the criminal in all his abject need, corrupt of nature, corrupt by practice, in no way deserving of any mercy as he stands condemned in the prisoner’s dock. But God, in all the righteous dignity of this universal court, backed by the august sovereignty of almighty power, has maintained His right to show mercy to the one who truly believes in Jesus.

Thus the condemned criminal, the sinner who has been brought in guilty before God, his mouth stopped, his entire spiritual anatomy laid bare, filled with corruption, has been forgiven on the basis of the substitutionary work of the One who took his place on Calvary, and he now stands under the benign gaze of God, the Judge of all, a sinner saved by grace. His sins are blotted out, his very identity with the man after the flesh totally obliterated in the death and resur-rection of Christ, and he stands in a place of favor before God. He is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, his very life is in the energy of the Holy Ghost who has taught him to say “Abba, Father.” More than that; he is declared one of God’s children, and as such he is an heir of God and a joint-heir with Christ. He is under the sunshine of the eternal love of God, every opposing force of the universe robbed of the last vestige of power to separate him from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is the background against which Paul’s appeal reaches us all, “I beseech you, brethren, by the compassion of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your intelligent service.”¹ It is as though the apostle, in view of such matchless grace, would declare to the entire audience in this courtroom their obligation to offer themselves up as a whole burnt offering for the pleasure of God, who has been so gracious to them.

However it’s a living sacrifice, in contrast to the dead sacrifices that were offered up throughout the Old Testament. In 2 Corinthians 5 it’s put in cryptic language of impelling fulness: “If one died for all then were all dead, and He died for all that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them and rose again.” God looks for some return from each of us because of the infinitude of His compassion toward us. Our return; our giving should be nothing short of our bodies as vehicles of service, totally consecrated to the will of God. Paul says, “This is your intelligent service.” The word “reasonable” in our common version is rather misleading.It is rather that God, who has given to mankind an intellect capable of appreciating goodness shown to him, knows that every kindness carries an obligation. If, by divine grace, God has saved us when we were on the way to a lost eternity with no thought of God, without God and without hope in the world, then our only intelligent behavior is to offer up our bodies, not as a vehicle for the gratification of our own pleasure and will, but as an instrument that may be offered up in total subjection to the will of God.

This presents a great challenge in this age because far too many “professional preachers” are proclaiming a watered down gospel that has largely lost its challenge.

Frequently the striving for numbers and contributions within organized religious bodies has resulted in presenting a way of salvation that has been made too simple. It has been reduced to the elements of simple assent to the terms of the Gospel, as if it made no demand upon us except to nod the head, say a few words, be baptized and then, as far as our life in this world is concerned, pass on largely unchanged, expecting of course that through God’s mercy we shall arrive in heaven because Christ died for us. That is a very small portion of the truth, and no doubt falls into the category of what is presented in chapter 2, “as neglecting so great salvation.”

The security of the true, faithful believer is a sterling and cherished truth of the New Testament, but no truth has been so abused by careless and superficial thinkers. According to the Scriptures, the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God comes out in dazzling brightness from the depths of heaven itself. It is the Gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. It sets Him forth as the Savior. The Gospel light shines into the human heart, and its first effect is to revolution-ize life. It radically changes us. When we are born again, we begin a new life – we are a new being. The old things are reckoned dead; we set forth on a new adventure; it is the adventure of a living faith in a living Lord. If a person professes to be a Christian and that profession does not change his life and he continues in sin, there is no intimation in the New Testament that he has any reason to believe he will arrive in heaven in the end. The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation and that salvation means emancipation from the power of Satan here and now or it means nothing.

Unfortunately many have confined the thought of salvation to eternity that is to come. The beginning of the road to salvation:

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

If you are among those who, through some emotional experience have made lip confession of Christ and have been baptized, yet your life has not been delivered from sin, then you need to begin all over again and really appoint the Lord Jesus as Lord of your life and Savior of your soul.² That is the truth presented by Paul. He appeals to those of us who have done that; to those of us offering up our bodies as a living sacrifice, a constant offering in the everyday affairs of life, which will be pleasurable to the God who has saved us.

Footnotes:
¹ The doctrinal section of Romans concluded with the great doxology of the last chapter; and, following the style of other Pauline letters, i.e., Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians, etc., Paul next presented for his readers various practical applications of the holy Gospel to their daily lives. Concerning this twelfth chapter, it may be doubted if there is a more influential chapter in the New Testament for determining what is acceptable Christian conduct, this being due not to the superiority of these inspired words over others, but due to the fact of them having been read so frequently in public Christian assemblies. Many a rural congregation throughout the world has had for its chief Sunday enlightenment the reading of this remarkable chapter by some member of the congregation, especially in those situations where the services of a full-time minister were not available. Some of the StudyJesus.com team remembers with joy the frequency with which this chapter appeared upon the weekly agenda of the Lord’s Day services in country churches attended as a youth, there having been no capable reader in the congregation who, at one time or another, was not called upon to read it. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.” (Rom. 12:1) How magnanimous is that authority which, having the power to command, stoops to plead for mortal compliance with God’s will. “I beseech you” according to Kenneth S. Wuest (Romans in the Greek New Testament, p. 204) means “I beg of you, please.” This admonition still lies under the spell of that heavenly love radiating from the great doxology just concluded in Romans 11, and relies strongly upon God’s great love as the basic motivation of all human obedience. “Present your bodies” … the body here is from the Greek word [soma], meaning the physical body; and, despite that Batey and others refer it to “the whole man,” (Richard A. Batey, The Letter of Paul to the Romans, p. 151), the contrast with “mind” in the next verse focuses the thought on the physical body here. Vincent, as quoted by Kenneth Wuest (Romans in the Greek New Testament, p. 205) stated that: “The body here is the physical body; and the word for ‘present’ is the technical term for presenting the Levitical offerings and victims.” “A living sacrifice” ... contrasts the slain offerings of the old institution with the living sacrifices of the new. The typical nature of the Old Testament regime, and the prophetic intent of its sacrifices and ceremonials, required that antitypes of the new covenant should be changed to accommodate the new information brought by the actual appearance of the Messiah upon the earth. For example, the sacrificial lamb, slain upon countless pre-Christian altars, was an eloquent and instructive type of the Lord Jesus Christ; but, when Christ came and died for man’s sins as the type indicated He would, there followed the resurrection of Christ from the dead, a fact incapable of being prefigured by the slaughter of a lamb. Therefore, in lieu of the old sacrifice God ordained that the Christian himself be presented as a living sacrifice, dying to sin, buried with Christ in baptism, and rising up to walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:1-4), and thus providing a continual witness of the primary facts of the Gospel (the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, 1 Cor. 15:1-4), and pointing back to those blessed events similarly to the manner in which the sacrificial lamb pointed forward to them, but with the significant difference that the new sacrifice referred far more emphatically to Christ than did the ancient type. Thus, it is evident that, in the Father’s wise design, the Lord Jesus Christ is the focus of all true religion, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament alike. Every true Christian is himself a presented sacrifice witnessing to the great facts of the Christian Gospel. Richard A. Batey (The Letter of Paul to the Romans, p.151) was correct in the view that: “This living sacrifice can best be understood in terms of dying and rising with Christ.” (Rom. 6:1-11) However, even more than this is certainly included. The believer presents his body for baptism, this being an important element in the new birth itself, and thus accomplishes a sacrifice which requires the volition and assent of the whole person; but the presenting does not end at the baptistery. There is also the formal and faithful presentation of the body in public corporate worship, regularly throughout the Christian’s probation. Now, as in Job’s day, “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord” (Job 1:6), the sons of God still present themselves before the Lord in the Lord’s Day assemblies of the church (and other times also), a duty which Christians are categorically commanded not to neglect (Heb. 10:25). Nor can it end there. The body is the chief instrument of the person and is to be presented to God through service to humanity, by preaching, teaching, ministering, and helping people, and not merely for some space of time, but throughout life. “Holy” ... modifies sacrifice; and, since the sacrifice in view is the body ([Greek: soma]), this amounts to an affirmation that the body, as such, is not evil. Paul noted in another place that the same body capable of being joined to a harlot, in the case of the Corinthians, was actually the “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:12-20). Such teaching prohibits the view that the body is in itself sinful or evil. “Acceptable to God” ... is the pledge of inspiration that believers presenting themselves in the manner indicated shall indeed be accepted by God and blessed in so doing. The condition of acceptance stated here is holiness; and, as W. Sanday (Ellicott’s Commentary on the Holy Bible, p. 251) observed: “The Christian sacrifice must be holy and pure in God’s sight; otherwise, it cannot be acceptable to him.” “Which is your reasonable service” ... (as in the KJV) appears to be a better rendition than the English Revised Version (1885), the commentators being all in agreement that “pertaining to the mind” is an essential element of the meaning here, thus Darby translated it “your intelligent service.” Kenneth Wuest (Romans in the Greek New Testament, p. 206) pointed out that Thayer said that this “reasonable service” is “worship which is rendered by the reason, or the soul.” The concept of what is the intended meaning, as viewed in this commentary, is that which sees that nothing could possibly be more reasonable, nor more in keeping with the conclusions of the highest intelligence, than the fact that mortal man, doomed to descend so shortly into the tomb, should rally all of his soul’s energies to seek the Lord and trust the Creator alone who has the power to redeem him from the rottenness of the grave and endow him with everlasting life, the agonizing desire of which is the great passion of mankind. Further, the most skillful exercise of intelligence, even of the greatest minds ever to appear on earth, reveals that such a seeking after God is fully consonant and harmonious with all that really blesses man, even in this life, and with all that in any way contributes to his peace and happiness now. Let a man employ his mind, his reason and intelligence, in the contemplation of one fact alone, namely, that God created man; and then let him ask if it is reasonable, or not, that such a being as God could have created man with such a nature as to make him happier in the service of the devil than in the service of God. In this single instance, and in a million others, the most ardent application of discerning intelligence will always reveal the reasonableness of serving God. It is believed that this is what Paul affirmed here.
²For more on this subject see God’s Salvation section on contents page of this website