News of salvation is relevant only in a world that is threatened with destruction. The frailty of humanity highlights our need for the power of God. The good news presupposes that there is something bad going on.

A negative expectation of the future was not unfamiliar to the citizens of the Roman Empire. This stands in stark contrast to the outlook on life in western culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when faith in progress predominated. In ancient times people always believed that the golden age was behind them and that history moved more and more away from that glorious and splendid past. Therefore, there was a rich breeding ground for all kinds of oriental religiosity that promised an escape from the doom of history in a mysterious way.

What is remarkable about Paul’s letter to the Romans is not that he provides a sombre image of the times, but that he identifies the direction from which the threat comes, the reason for the threatening destruction, and the way in which it will take place. The deliverance he preaches is concerned with all of that.

The direction from which the great danger threatens to come is the reality of the repudiated and wrathful Creator. The reason for the threatening destruction is that humanity lacks the obedience of faith (in one God) (Romans 1:5). And the way of the destruction seems to be the moral disintegration. God, the Creator of the first world, who caused it to be destroyed by the flood, stands in the centre of it all and who, in the second world again, but now in a different way, makes his wrath be felt in an ominous way.

The good news about the deliverance for Jew and Greek through Jesus Christ is extremely useful for a world that is threatened with destruction. However, the special message of Paul is not that the threatened destruction is a fateful doom over the earth, but that it is threatening because of the righteous wrath of God.

The image Paul provides in this section is one of a world apart from Israel’s God, which does not differ much from the depiction of it commonly found among believing Jewish writers at the time. That is understandable. Romans 1:18–32 can be formulated in terms of the revelation in the Old Testament. Paul uses this characterization to make clear why he knows himself to be a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and the foolish (Romans 1:14). It turns out that the seemingly huge difference between the cultural world of Greeks on the one hand and of barbarian, underdeveloped nations on the other hand is not so significant. Much more significant is the dividing line between heaven and earth, between the Creator and the many foolish wise people, between Israel and the Gentiles.¹