Thus by the concluding principles of Romans Chapter 15 verses 1 and 2, we who are strong Christians should bear, tolerate, or put up with the "infirmities of the weak," but only when "for his good to edification." What we are to edify or improve is his inner faith in Jesus Christ, which is the measure of a man and of his virtue and salvation as we were just reminded in the last two verses of Chapter 14. It is often difficult for the strong Christian in his or her passion for what is right to be disciplined enough to pardon the lesser violations of Christian doctrine for the good of faith. Glancing a bit ahead at Romans Chapter 15 verse 14 and verse 15, we find an explicit declaration from Paul that his Gentile audience does indeed participate in strong Christianity — that they are "full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another." This is partially why he says he has "written the more boldly unto" them "on some points." He is challenging them to not only follow pure Christianity in their own lives, but like him to do so deeply and complexly to the degree of prioritizing how much of that pure Christianity is imposed on those who are strong enough to have faith in Christ but too weak to accept the full daily benefits of that faith. However as for the gospel that they should preach to the world and that we today should preach to the world, all else being equal, that is definitely the unmitigated 'belief in Christ or destructive vengeance of God' doctrine of Romans 3 and the 'death of daily Jew-ritual or adulterous daily service' doctrine of Romans 7. If someone is exceptionally struggling with Romans 7, we should not force it upon them so as to separate them from Romans 3, as long as their motivation per Romans 3 is to adhere to Christ and not to a race or a race's laws. However we in truth and obedience should present the entire Christian doctrine in its perfection to the rest of the world, and there is no better way to love our neighbors than that.
In Romans 15 verses 8 to 12, we see a proportional indication from Paul whom the leaders of World Christianity were then, intermixed with a now-fulfilled prophecy of who they would be thereafter, which in a word is "Gentiles." In the first of the five verses, he does indeed say that "Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers." We have seen most beautifully in Romans 4 that Christ was the fulfillment of all promises to Father Abraham by way of the law of faith, and only to those who believe in Christ, who whether racially Jewish or not are equally full partakers in that fulfillment. Romans 4:13-14 is worth repeating a thousand times, "For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect." Also the historical foundation of Romans 4:11 is critical, that "he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also." Beyond the promise of salvation, Romans 2 told us that circumcision of the heart is all that matters in terms of anyone's virtue. Then Romans 9 reinforced that the corporeal seed of Abraham — those who are racially Jewish — are not children of God unless they accept Jesus Christ like the Gentiles who have acquired righteousness by faith, by becoming Christians. With this knowledge, we understand in Romans 15 verse 8 exactly how Jesus Christ was a "minister of the circumcision," what His "truth of God" was, and how He "confirmed the promises made unto the fathers." In all cases, the outcomes of the life of Jesus Christ were in practice heavily skewed to benefit the Gentiles and to damn the vast majority of the Jews to destruction, and two thousand more years of world history have very accurately reflected this Gentile-heavy Christianity, as philosophically and foundation-historically expressed in the Romans Epistle.
That is why when Paul - theologically-certain but uncertain how much longer God would grant him safety from the murderous Jews — began to close his timeless letter, he followed with four prophecies that confirm the Gentiles as the primary purpose of Christ, and therefore as to always be the lion's share of the victorious part of God's human creation. He had just told these strong Gentiles not to exclude the rare Jews who believe in Christ, but there can be no question that Paul knew that the greater part of Christianity would always be those who are not physically qualified for the Old Covenant by circumcision but qualified only for the New Covenant by faith. Romans 5 verses 9 to 12: "And that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy; as it is written, For this cause I will confess to thee among the Gentiles, and sing unto thy name. And again he saith, Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with his people. And again, Praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles; and laud him, all ye people. And again, Esaias saith, There shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles trust."
It is both amazing and obvious how God can cast off and graft on whom He wants on His own tree of triumph and glory, though by dramatically shifting the requirements through incarnated suffering, He did so in great passion to show empathy with us — all of us equally! — in our state as lesser beings but with Godlike free will so as to joyfully resemble His Greater Being individually by way of our self-aware existences. Jesus Christ remediated our use of that free will to depart from God, and gave us righteousness only for really acknowledging that He as God did in fact remediate our sin by way of the cross, which is such a subtle action of belief on our part that it may be presented as no action at all on our part. The typical Jew would still rather hopelessly climb an endless mountain of broken glass, while the Gentile blessed in his simplicity of heart and lack of ingrained cultural obstruction, would more often rather just accept Jesus Christ. The Epistle to the Romans is consistent with our Savior's spoken prophecy in Luke 4:25-27, that this was heavenly planned since before the Jews by-and-large rejected Jesus.
Paul therein took the universal-but-inevitably-Gentile Christianity of Jesus Christ and in more philosophical detail instructed the Gentiles on it from an even more specifically Gentile perspective. That he had been chosen by God as the doctrinal perfector of the leaders of Christianity was the other reason, overlapping the reason of the Gentiles' Christian strength, why Paul wrote to them "more boldly in some sort." "That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles," he says in Romans verse 15:16, and in verses 17 and 18 that his Gentile service to God is his only pride.
Everything Paul included about Jews was relative to Gentile thoughts — how they should going forward understand the miserable destiny of the fallen, and how they should have mercy on the tiny remnant that would make it out by the one way of mirroring the Gentiles' Christian faith. It is really no surprise that he still implies that the Romans should honor the few good Christian men at Jerusalem, seeing that most of these were their predecessors in the faith and who more senior than the surviving apostles of Jesus Christ? The KJV translates verses 26 to 28 as: "But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints. For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things." Partly this was done because those at Jerusalem were poor, but as to their sainthood, the word that Paul used for this in his original Greek was "hagiōn." He therefore describes the recipients as "the poor among the hagiōn in Jerusalem" in verse 15:26. Before that in verse 15:25, he used the form "hagiois" to say "I am going to Jerusalem ministering to the hagiois." It is important to realize that this is the exact same word that he used for the Roman Gentile Christians in the Epistle's opening way back in verse 1:7, where he said "To all those being in Rome beloved of God called hagiois." Most translations including the KJV and ESV translate "hagiois" in Romans 1:7 as "saints," in reference to the Roman Gentile saints, while the NIV translates it as "holy people" which is close enough (and maybe better if they would have been consistent). However inexplicable and simply incorrect is how the NIV slips in the word "Jews" in Romans 15:27 for the pronoun "autois" and "autōn" after first translating the same "hagiois" as "Lord's people" in Romans 15:25 and "hagiōn" as "Lord's people" in Romans 15:26. Paul used the same Greek word "hagiois" to mean Christians whether Gentile as in Romans 1:7 or Jewish as in Romans 15:25, so the NIV's first probably-intentional mistake in this regard was to translate this same word differently as "holy people" for Gentiles and "Lord's people" for Jews. Yet this pales in comparison to how outrageous it is that they would interject the racial word "Jews" into Romans 15:27 for the pronoun referring back to "hagiois." It makes the verse sound as if it were speaking of the Jews regardless of religion when Paul was instead using language referring specifically to the Christians in Jerusalem without any race attached to his words. Of course in Jerusalem the Christians there were Jewish because Gentile Christians would have been treated badly as we saw in Acts 22, and because Gentile Christianity in Antioch had become the epicenter of pure Christianity anyway so they had no use for Jerusalem other than the type of strong-to-the-weak charity that Paul had just described in Romans 14. Nearly all other translations, including the KJV and ESV, do translate "hagiois" as "saints" in Romans 15:25 and "hagiōn" as "saints" in Romans 15:26, and then use the English pronoun "them" for Paul's Greek pronoun "autois" and "autōn" in Romans 15:27. The NIV has instead chosen a false racially-charged translation that can mislead an unsuspecting reader away from a proper understanding of Jesus Christ's raceless New Covenant.
Hopefully not a single Roman who had just read or heard read the Roman Epistle would have been foolish enough to think that Paul meant by verse 27 that Christians should minister to other Christians in different degrees based on race. They by then must have understood that God and His New Covenant have no respect of persons (Rm. 2:11), observe no difference between races (Rm. 3), and bestow rewards race-indifferently upon all who call on the same Lord (Rm. 10:12). Also they heard and understood the word "hagiois" used for both Gentiles and Jews, without a 1970s mistranslation to confuse them. For a modern heretic still, it should be quite difficult for him to read in Romans 10:12 that "there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek" in terms of God's richness to them, and then to tell Gentiles that they, as servants of God, should distribute their God-granted richness today to Christian Jews unevenly more so than to other Christians — due solely to corporeal race. Today's Jewish Christians are definitely not any fathers of ours, but are indeed our brothers in Christian equality, who rather departed from their typical racial behavior and mimicked the behavior of accepting Jesus Christ that is much more usual in those who are racially Gentile. Thus both Gentile and Jew in so doing become raceless family in the raceless Kingdom of God, with our enemies being those who oppose Christianity, also without regard to their race.
That is not to say that there are not demographic trends in anti-Christianity, or that one of these is not doubtlessly the work of Satan that will last until the final days, or that all such trends do not need to be understood for our self-defense and for our holy aggression. The majority of Jews then had chosen to be Paul's enemies because they had chosen to be Christ's enemies. That is why, before his charity trip to relieve Peter and the historically significant others, Paul requests prayer that he not be killed while doing so. Romans 15:30-31, "Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me; That I may be delivered from them that do not believe in Judaea." He is asking the Romans to pray that the Jewish powers that be in Jerusalem do not kill him before he can go to Rome and see those Gentiles to whom he had just written the definitive Christian philosophical treatise. We know that in Acts 22 the specific worry was shown to be very well justified, although the non-believing Jews had continually tried to kill him ever since he had left their race mafia for worldwide Christian love. An inordinate portion of non-believing Jews have worked against Christianity ever since, and it is difficult to imagine any other time in world history where their efforts were any more than they are in our present time. The non-Christian Jews of today have used the secular democratic cultural and political environments of our modern nations to try to blot out or — more usually — corrupt as much Christian faith as they can, and Satan has seen to their wide-ranging success in doing so.
