The Christ Current

In 1882, engineers at Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan flipped a switch, and electric current surged through copper wires beneath the city streets. Within moments, four hundred lamps blazed to life in offices and homes across a square mile of New York. The power had been there all along, humming in the dynamos. But it meant nothing until it flowed.

The Greek word Paul uses in Romans 1:16 is dunamis — raw, world-altering power. Not power locked in a vault or admired from a distance, but power transmitted. Paul had watched this gospel reach Roman soldiers and Greek philosophers, Jewish merchants and enslaved workers in Corinth. It crossed every boundary that empire, culture, and prejudice had erected. And it changed everyone it touched.

Here is what the engineers at Pearl Street understood: power that stays at the generating station lights nothing. It must travel the wire. It must enter the building. It must reach the filament before darkness gives way.

Paul says he is not ashamed of this gospel because he has seen what it does when it arrives. It is not a theory about God's power. It is God's power — for salvation, for everyone who believes. First the Jew, then the Gentile. No one excluded from the circuit.