The Letter to the Romans: Message #4 – Meet the People in Rome (Part 2)

Continued from Letter to the Romans Part 3 –

The entire conquest of the Roman Empire was not military. It was not wanting power or land. It took all of those things, but basically, it was their obsession with keeping their city protected. Isn’t that fascinating? All the rest was a result of that, and they built up this mystique of the city of Rome. If you lived in the city of Rome, you had unique privileges. You were a citizen of the city of Rome. You could not be crucified. You could do this, you could that—all sorts of privileges. And everybody pledged their allegiance to Rome. It’s very difficult for you and me to appreciate the power of the concept of Rome, its influence on your life and mine today. It was like a cult. You’ve heard the word chauvinist—one who is totally enamored with, obsessed with an idea. Well, this was what was going on in that day. Rome—I don’t want to use the word myth, but I don’t know how to describe it any other way.

Rome, the city to be protected. Rome, above and beyond all men, above Caesars, above armies, above everything—Rome. Rome. The Roman salute was a pledge to guard the city of Rome, and you never asked why. Like a religious cult that does weird things, you never ask why. It’s Rome. There is a certain thing that becomes so sacred you never ask why. There’s no reason behind it. It just is, and you better say it, and you better do it, and you better believe it, because if you don’t, you’re in big trouble. You’ve got to honor the city of Rome. It was an incredible thing. It’s very difficult to describe, but that attitude is what came over into the Roman Catholic Church, and it went from a city to a kind of denomination. It was, at all costs, the church. You don’t question the church. You don’t ask about the church. You don’t fight the church. You obey the church. That was the attitude of Rome. You don’t ask about Rome. You don’t question Rome. You obey Rome, or you’re in big trouble. That came right over into the Roman Catholic Church, and cults today pick that up; and Baptists pick it up. We’re Baptists. You don’t ask why you’re a Baptist, what a Baptist is. Baptist—that just ends it. Baptist. Methodists do it. Do the cell ministries do that? We’re the cell ministries. Of course, it’s very dangerous.

Now, Octavia, who became Augustus Caesar, made a boast, and if I’m not mistaken—Jiminy Crickets—I believe he became Caesar in 15 or 14 B.C. Somebody prove me wrong here, would you? He did something in 15 or 14 B.C. Would somebody look it up and tell me more? So, who’s got anything? A Bible dictionary? Tomorrow, come tell me if I’m right or wrong. Anyway, I remember 14 or 15 B.C., something or other, but he made this boast. He said, “When I became Caesar, Rome was stone, and when my reign ended, Rome was marble.” He had turned it from rock to marble. Now, Julius Caesar had started this, but all the Caesars thereafter for a hundred years, part of what they did was build monuments and rebuild the city. The city was just transformed incredibly by Augustus, and after that, every Caesar felt like they needed to do the same thing. Now, do you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about building aqueducts all the way from Africa and running water all the way up and down all of the areas. Aqueducts brought water all the way down from Switzerland—we’d call it Switzerland today—to feed the city.

Huge fountains were built by Augustus—water fountains. It’s called the City of Water. Have any of you ever been there? It’s called the Eternal City because they figured it would never collapse. The downtown main part of the city, the marketplace, and the Forum were built elaborately out of marble. Wide streets with colonnades so that they could march down, bearing their new slaves and new captives when they went out and conquered somebody. Downtown city had very broad streets, very large avenues—probably the best-built roads that man has ever built in history; they still are using them right there, the Italians, today, whereas we tear up our freeways every 15 years, those things were sunk about yay deep in stone, and they just don’t ever wear out. By the way, you can do that when you have millions of slaves of free labor to do it. The population of this beautiful city is about a million. There are around 50,000 Jews in it, and I suspect that at this moment, there are probably around 50 to 100 Christians. It couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred. Some people have tried to put it at 1,000; I think that’s way too many at the time of the writing of the book of Romans.

I will also tell you that these are high-quality people, because that church grew very rapidly. Between 54 and 64, a period of just 10 years, they grew enough that the Roman emperor himself knew they were in town. In 10 years! And this is a town that has literally thousands of religions. People come from all over the world. Have you ever been to London recently? I don’t know if you have or not, but London today is a bazaar of nations. You don’t ever see an Englishman on the streets of downtown London anymore. You see everything else on earth. Well, if you walked into the city of Rome, there are the Romans, but people come there from all over the world to do their trading and to set up businesses, and every one of them brings a god with them. Every god is welcomed, and they figure this god is kind of like this god, so they’re the same god—you worship him. Worship any god you want to; it doesn’t matter a bit. It’s a cultural thing. They’re all accepted.

They have a problem with one group because they’re different. They’ll only worship one God. They don’t particularly like these people. But these people—mark this, this is a little-known fact—these people have the second to the largest banking system in the world, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. They got money, and they’re traders, and they’re good traders, and whether you like them or not and their peculiarities—the way they look, the way they talk, and their funny religion—nonetheless, they’re holding a good part of the Roman Empire together because they’re basically honest businessmen. They have a bank filled with gold, and they have the second most powerful center of gold and banking in the world. Now, who are they? The Jews. Do you know where their bank is? Where? Inside the temple. Kept inside the temple is their bank—that which the Lord Jesus turned over.

It’s the second-largest banking system in the world, so they have privileges in that city at times. At other times, they are persecuted. I want you to see them—Rome, Italy—a city of one million people, people from all over the planet there, every kind of person there is, temples everywhere to different gods, huge, beautiful streets, but what you and I would call an alley off of the main streets—they are filthy. Garbage is never collected; it’s thrown in the streets from upstairs and out the front door into these little alleyways. They have a little trough about yay big, and that sits there and rots. It gets covered with flies, and it stays until the rain washes it away into the Tiber River. There were lots of jokes the Romans told about never walking at night, never walking the streets of Rome at night, and never walking them during the day. At night, you will get—now this is all in rhyme—at night you will get mugged, robbed, and possibly killed by thieves, and in the daytime, somebody will probably throw a brick out their window into the street and knock and crush your head. The point was that there was no safe time to walk the alleyways of Rome, Italy. I want you to know that these brothers and sisters are not living on the grand, open byways and highways of that town. They are down those little filthy alley streets, and little bitty—excuse me using this term to express it—God-forsaken, little bitty rooms with little bitty windows.

There are a few of those buildings that have remained today. Some of them went all the way up like this. They’re called insulas, and we get the word insulation from it, don’t ask me why, with little bitty windows in them, and people would come from all over the world and go into those places, these tiny rooms, and pack themselves in. See a great, beautiful, majestic city of marble as long as you stayed on the main concourses. See pitiful, tragic, pitiful, horrible, smelly places in the back streets where it is dangerous to come out at night or day.

See the bazaars, see the marketplaces, see the trading, see men making deals for spices, for wine, for jars and vases, for herbs and spices. See the wheat markets of the world being auctioned off there. See the slaves being bought and sold. See that the city has grown to seven hills. Look down the road and see 120 acres being cleared by young Nero. At this moment, this is taking place right now—he is building himself a new palace, and the jokes were going around that day, if that house gets any bigger, there will be no Rome. Stand somewhere where you can see and look and see the gigantic villas off away. There are the powerhouses of the world. Those are men who control enormous amounts of gold. They have dozens, if not hundreds, of slaves working and doing their bidding. These are the people that Hollywood always depicts. There are only a few of them, a few dozen, a few hundred. See the soldiers everywhere with their swords, and know this: in a city of one million people, would you like to guess how many of them are slaves? Now, we’re talking the bottom rung here—slaves. There was a census taken; we know how many there were. Does anybody want to guess? In a city of a million people, how many of them were owned slaves? Five hundred thousand of them—one half. Half of the people were slaves. This is why this thing of “read your Bible,” this never did—I mean, I’m for reading your Bible, don’t misunderstand—we as Christians have never faced the fact of illiteracy in the first century, and I’m only saying that to defend an indwelling Lord. That’s the only reason I ever bring the subject up—it’s to defend an indwelling Lord. Those people had to have a Word within them because they could not read, and they could not write.

Now, that’s the slaves. That has nothing to do with the peasants, the poverty-stricken people who slept in the alleyways and the streets, and who lived on just enough to buy wheat and millet. Millet and wheat were the two. There were some oats and some of that stuff, and the seven-grain cereal, but that’s about what those people lived on. And there’s a very small middle class made up of Jews, Greek merchants, and some of the others. Then you have the slightly more wealthy, and then you have the extremely wealthy who control that city and most of the known world. And there are the seventy senators in a building who meet right down near the center of the main Roman forum.