Romans 14, Part 2. On what the kingdom is made of. Read Part 1 here.
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.— Romans 14:17
Yesterday we looked across the table and saw a brother Christ died for. Today Paul lifts our eyes a little higher.
In all sixteen chapters of Romans, his longest letter, Paul names the kingdom of God exactly once. Here. In the middle of a dispute about vegetables and meat (Romans 14:2).
That placement is the point. Paul does not save the kingdom for a grand passage about the end of the age. He brings it into the dining room, because that is where the Romans were losing sight of it. They were treating the menu as if the kingdom rose or fell on it. Paul says it doesn’t. The kingdom is made of something else.
Righteousness, peace, joy. They could read like three good things in no particular order. But Paul has used them in this order before.
Early in the letter he wrote, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God, and a line later, we rejoice (Romans 5:1–2). Justified. Peace. Rejoice. The same three steps.
“Justified” and “righteousness” share one Greek root, and all through Romans the noun, dikaiosynē (δικαιοσύνη), has meant something God gives: the verdict that declares a sinner right with Him, justified by his grace as a gift (Romans 3:24). Some read 14:17 as right living among believers, and that is part of it. But in this letter the word has carried the whole argument. It is hard to hear it without hearing grace.
Read it again.
For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.— Romans 14:17
So the kingdom has an order. Grace first. Grace brings peace. Peace spills over into joy. No one reaches the third without passing through the first.
Which means a believer at war with a brother has not simply lost his peace. Somewhere along the way he has lost sight of grace. And where grace goes missing, joy follows it out the door. That is what a life without grace looks like, not according to a preacher, but according to the order Paul set down. No grace, no peace. No peace, no joy.
Jesus told a story about this at a dinner table. A Pharisee named Simon had invited Him, and a woman known in the town as a sinner came in and wept over His feet. Simon said nothing out loud. Jesus replied to what he had not said (Luke 7:36–40).
Two men owed money, He said. One owed five hundred denarii, the other fifty (Luke 7:41). A denarius was roughly a day’s wage, so one man owed more than a year of work and the other less than two months. The lender canceled both debts. Which of them will love him more? (Luke 7:42).
Simon’s answer had a shrug in it. The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt (Luke 7:43). Correct, and not eager to be. Then Jesus said the line that explains more of our lives than we would like: he who is forgiven little, loves little (Luke 7:47).
Jesus never says Simon’s debt was small. The story suggests Simon only thought it was. That is usually where contempt for a brother begins. Not in how badly he has failed, but in how small we imagine our own debt to be.
Paul knew which debtor he was. He had approved of Stephen’s death and dragged believers out of their homes (Acts 8:1–3). He later called himself the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God (1 Corinthians 15:9).
After the light on the Damascus road, he sat blind for three days and neither ate nor drank (Acts 9:9). Luke does not tell us what went through his mind. I have often wondered. A man who had tried to tear the church apart, and Jesus called him by name. I suspect he spent those three days turning one question over and over. Why me?
The rest of his life reads like the answer. The man who once carried letters authorizing arrests (Acts 9:2) would one day write love is patient and kind (1 Corinthians 13:4). Forgiven much. Loving much.
God chose a people out of the whole world. And then, from among the ones He chose, we pick one out and set him aside. Too rigid, too loose, too slow to change. We would never say it out loud. We just never sit near him.
Paul does not answer with a technique for managing conflict. He reminds us what we live on. Let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding (Romans 14:19). The peace he means is not something we manufacture by trying harder to like someone. It grows out of grace, and only out of grace. Once we remember how much we were forgiven, it becomes very hard to keep a list of what someone else owes us.
Paul gave the Romans a question underneath their question. Not “Who is right about the meat?” but “What are we living on?”
If peace and joy have gone out of a relationship, it may be worth tracing back to the first thing on the menu. When did we last take the measure of our own debt? I find I forget it faster than I would like.
Grace is what the kingdom serves. Peace and joy are how it tastes.
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