Paul follows this statement with a string of quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures that foresee the role of the Messiah as reaching the Gentiles and causing them to turn in praise to the One God of Israel. He includes a verse from Isaiah 11 that is particularly straightforward: “The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope” (Romans 15:12). The “root of Jesse” is a reference to the Messiah of the line of King David, whose father’s name was Jesse. Notice, this Messiah actually rises to rule the Gentiles, who come to hope in him—their resurrected Lord! This is what Paul regularly refers to as “the obedience of faith” among the nations (Romans 16:26). But Jesus never went to the Gentiles, having been sent as a “servant to the circumcised.” Even though Jesus did on occasion deal with non-Jews who showed extraordinary faith, we have no record of Jesus leading any movement to reach Gentiles. In fact, there are several strands of gospel tradition in which he explicitly avoids such a mission (Mark 7:27; Matthew 10:5; 15:24). Jesus’ twelve apostles were commissioned to extend Jesus’ work to reach those Israelites scattered throughout the world. The letter we have in the New Testament from James is addressed “to the Twelve tribes of the Diaspora” (James 1:1). Peter’s first letter is likewise addressed to “the exiles of the Diaspora.”
It is here that Paul finds his unique and pivotal role. Paul understands his mission as extending and advancing the work that Jesus inaugurated in his lifetime, but never completed. If the Messiah’s ultimate purpose is to rule over the Gentiles, what Paul calls the “reconciliation of the world,” causing them to turn to God, how can this goal ever be accomplished? Peter and the Twelve had already agreed with Paul that they would go “to the circumcision”—so what about the rest of the world?
As Paul fulfills this messianic mission he understands himself to be performing the work of Christ. In that sense Paul is an extension of Christ, finishing up the main task of the Messiah as a kind of “second Christ.” He explains this complicated dynamic in the following way: “[God gave me grace] to be a servant of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:16). Here Paul is acting in behalf of Christ and his mission is to function like a priest who brings an offering to God—in this case the offering is the “obedience of the Gentiles,” which fulfills the messianic mission of Jesus. Paul says he will not boast of anything in this regard “except what Christ has worked through me, to win obedience from the Gentiles” (Romans 15:18). In Paul’s mind his work is really Christ’s work and whatever he does is as an extension of Christ, now acting in the world through him. In the same way he can tell the Corinthians to expel the man living with his stepmother in a gathering at which his Spirit would be present—everything that Paul did he attributed to Christ working through him, and his commands were thus the “commands of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 14:37).
Paul believed that his calling and his mission to the Gentiles were witnessed in the Hebrew Prophets, long before his birth (Romans 15:9–12). His was a destined role, backed up by the scriptures and his own visionary experiences. There are various passages in the Hebrew Bible that indicate a time when the Gentiles will turn to the God of Israel (Isaiah 11:10). Notice these lines in particular from one of Isaiah’s passages about a “Servant” of Yahweh who will serve as an agent to bring light to the Gentiles:
Listen to me you coastlands,
and hearken you Gentiles
After a long time it will happen.
From my mother’s womb he has called my name.
He has made my mouth a sharp sword,
and he has hidden me under the shadow of his hand;
He has made me a chosen shaft . . .
Behold I have given you for the covenant of a race,
for a light to the Gentiles,
That you should be for salvation
to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 49:1–6)
The personal way in which this passage addresses one who would specifically be designated from his mother’s womb to preach a message that would bring light to the Gentiles and result in the salvation of the earth likely drew Paul’s attention. He quotes the passage directly in 2 Corinthians 6:2 (Isaiah 49:1–2, 6) in justifying his special “ministry.” Apparently some at Corinth had questioned his authority, suggesting that he needed “letters of recommendation,” presumably from James or the Jerusalem apostles, to vouch for his claims (2 Corinthians 3:1–3). His response was that their Spirit-led lives are his “letters” and his sufferings and hardships are his commendation, including beatings, imprisonments, poverty, and hunger (2 Corinthians 6:4–9). This also fits well with Isaiah 49, where this servant who goes to the Gentiles is “deeply despised, abhorred by the Gentiles,” but nonetheless becomes a “covenant to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:7–8).9
What Paul expected was that his priestly service of turning thousands of Gentiles to the God of Israel would cause some of those Israelites who rejected Christ to be jealous:
Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? (Romans 11:13–15)
According to Paul, God had purposely “hardened” the majority of the Jewish people so that they would temporarily reject Christ, so that he, Paul, could then take his gospel message to the Gentile world—thus reconciling the world to God and completing the work of Christ. According to Paul, this was God’s secret plan: “Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25). This was Paul’s way of accounting for the fact that the Jewish people as a whole had not accepted Jesus as Messiah but were continuing to practice the Torah of Moses. He had come to believe that everything depended on him and thus he set his travel itinerary to travel west, to Rome and finally even to Spain—so that he could literally say that he had reached to the ends of the earth, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy (Romans 15:23–29).
Paul saw his suffering in the world as an extension of the redemptive suffering of Christ, who was God’s Suffering Servant to the Israelites. At one point, when pressed hard by some of his opponents in Galatia, he declares: “Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the wounds [stigmata] of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). He saw his own beatings, lashings, and stoning as equivalent to the wounds Jesus suffered, and as ample testimony to his special apostolic role (2 Corinthians 11:23–25).
When Paul first began to work in the provinces of Asia Minor and Greece in the early 50s A.D., he fully expected to live to see the return of Christ and the end of the age. In his earlier letters he writes in the first person of how “we who are alive” at that time will be lifted up into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:17). By the 60s A.D., when he had been imprisoned in Rome, he began to anticipate that his own life, like that of Christ, “would be poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith” (Philippians 2:17). The language here is difficult to translate, but Paul seems to be saying that as a priest he will bring the “faith” of his Gentile followers as an offering to God with the pouring of his own blood over it. He goes on to say, in the same letter to the Philippians, that he anticipates dying and being resurrected just as Christ had done: