In Romans 1:16-17 I believe Paul lays out his thesis, or his main idea for his letter to the Roman church;

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.  For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”

It has been written by more than one commentator that Romans is a sort of peacemaking letter; a letter to reconcile the Jewish and Gentile Christians.  Judging by Paul’s statement here, I would agree with them.  Paul’s message is simply the gospel, and the primary implication is that all men - including Gentiles - are saved in the same manner.

Why does Paul begin by saying I am not ashamed of the gospel?  Why would any believer even think to be ashamed of the message which has brought salvation?  I think the shame that was present for some Jews was that if they truly believed the gospel, then they were no longer unique in comparison to the Gentiles.   This is exactly Paul’s point, that the Jews had no reason to think that they were better than the Gentiles.  He will tell them in ch.3 “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Concerning salvation, we are all on a level playing field, which is a level completely separated from God.  It is not that Paul is telling them to forget their heritage, in fact he still says that salvation is “to the Jew first.”  The point is that while the Jewish heritage is valuable, the Jewish people have no reason to boast before God because they are saved in the same manner as everyone else; faith.  The Jews were special and unique because of God’s actions, not because of their own actions.  Therefore, Paul is simply reminding them here at the outset that he is not ashamed of this message because he understands that he is every bit as sinful as the Gentiles and that he is in great need of this message called the gospel.

The second major point in this text comes when Paul mentions the “righteousness of God.”  This is exactly why both Jews and Gentiles are equal before God; they don’t have nor can they possess by their own merit the righteousness of God.  This is a phenomenal text if we really think about it; “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.”  I think that in Jewish history the righteousness of God was revealed at least partially by the law and the prophets, but the problem was that no one obeyed the law and the prophets perfectly.  Also, those Old Testament saints who had faith in God, like Abraham, were those who were closest to the righteousness of God.  And from what Paul tells us here, it seems that the righteousness revealed in the gospel is applied to the Old Testament saints who truly had faith.  This truth is at the same time overwhelmingly simple and amazingly powerful.  The Jews who prided themselves on attaining righteousness through the law must have been thinking, “there is no way that it comes only through faith, you have to do all this other stuff too.”  Yet, their offense may be grounded upon a true principle, that the righteousness of God is so great it must take great measures to attain it.  They are right, but the problem is that this thinking doesn’t exalt God’s righteousness enough.  We must think so highly of God’s righteousness that we realize there is nothing we can do to attain it.  At the point that we realize this height of God’s righteousness and our separation from Him, we are ready for the gospel.  We are then ready to receive the free gift because we have given up on trying to earn it.  Therefore, when everyone stops trying to earn salvation, they no longer look down upon, or up to each other in a prideful manner because we see people as God sees them.