Written for us

Paul is arguing about whether strong Christians should accommodate weak ones. He quotes a psalm about Christ bearing reproach. And then, before moving on, he stops to justify the quotation itself.

Everything that was written in the past was written for our instruction.

Take the scope of that seriously. Everything. Not the passages that transfer easily. The census lists, the boundary descriptions, the siege of a city that no longer exists, the prophet who married a prostitute because he was told to.

Written in the past — centuries before Paul, to people who were not Paul, in a language most of his readers in Rome did not speak.

And written for us.

Now the machinery of the verse, because Paul builds a chain and every link matters.

Written for our instruction — the word is teaching, the same root as the disciple word. That is the purpose.

So that through endurance — the word for remaining under a weight without collapsing.

And through the encouragement of the Scriptures — and the noun there is from the same family as the Comforter, the one called alongside.

We might have hope.

We want hope. Paul says hope comes through endurance and encouragement, and both of those come through the Scriptures, and the Scriptures come to us as old documents that must be read.

There is no shortcut in the chain. A man cannot get the hope at the end without the reading at the beginning, and he cannot get the endurance without something to endure.

And note which Scriptures Paul means. In about AD 57 he is talking about what we call the Old Testament — the whole of it, including the parts a Christian reader is most tempted to skip. His argument in the surrounding verses depends on a psalm being about Christ, and he treats that as the ordinary way the old books work.

Four verses later he says something similar in a slightly different key: whatever happened to them was written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come. Instruction and warning, both aimed forward, out of documents whose original readers had no idea we would be here.

It is also worth noting what Paul does not say. He does not say everything written in the past applies to us in the same way it applied to them. He says it was written for our instruction. The distinction between application and instruction is what keeps a reader from either dismissing the Old Testament or misusing it, and Paul’s own practice is the model — he quotes a psalm, and what he draws from it is a pattern of self-denial rather than a rule.

Which is the working answer to the most common question about the Old Testament. Not is this relevant to me but what was I meant to learn from it — and Paul assumes there is always an answer.

The verb tense in was written is the perfect — it was written and it stands written, the same construction behind the formula met in Week Five. Paul is not describing an act completed in the past but a standing document.

The word for endurance, hypomone, is the same one used of the good soil in Luke 8:15 producing a crop by persevering. The two passages describe the same quality from opposite ends: what the word produces, and what produces the crop.

The word for encouragement, paraklesis, shares a root with parakletos, the name Jesus gives the Spirit in John 14–16. The comfort of the Scriptures and the Comforter are not two unrelated things in New Testament vocabulary.

1 Corinthians 10:11 makes the parallel claim about the wilderness generation and is worth reading beside this: those things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us. Paul says it twice, in two letters, about two different bodies of material.

The word for hope in the New Testament is not optimism about probable outcomes. It is confident expectation of something promised, and Paul closes the paragraph two verses later by calling God the God of hope and asking that his readers overflow with it by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:4 is Paul’s justification for a method he uses constantly. Romans alone quotes the Old Testament some sixty times. The verse is not an aside about the value of Bible reading; it is the stated ground of his entire way of arguing.

Look it upG1319 διδασκαλία didaskalia, teaching, instruction · G5281 ὑπομονή hypomone, endurance, remaining under · G3874 παράκλησις paraklesis, encouragement, comfort · G1680 ἐλπίς elpis, hope

Where this touchesRomans 15:1–6 · 1 Corinthians 10:1–11 · Luke 8:15 · John 14:16 · 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (Week Two, Day Six). Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, Isaiah 55:10–11, Matthew 24:35, Psalm 12:6 and Matthew 5:18 were the earlier single-verse days.